Kevin Coriz — Kewa (Santo Domingo Pueblo) Silversmith

Kevin Coriz. Kewa — Santo Domingo Pueblo. A farmer and a framer before he was a silversmith — and a maker who reads the finished piece in the raw stone.

Most silversmiths draw the design first. Kevin Coriz refuses to. He came to silver the long way — through farming, ranching, and seventeen years framing custom homes — and he brought a builder's eye with him: he looks at a stone and sees the finished piece before he's cut a thing. When his instructors taught him to sketch on paper first, he pushed back. He'd already built houses. He knew he could see the whole before he started the parts.

The Marks

We don't have a documented hallmark for Coriz on record yet — not in our own files, the footage, or the published sources — so we won't invent one. His work is best identified by provenance and by the man himself, on camera below. (If you hold a Coriz piece with a mark, that's exactly the kind of first-hand detail this directory is built to capture.)

The Smith

He is Kewa — Santo Domingo Pueblo — and he arrived at his craft as, in his own word, a "Renaissance" path. He farmed and ranched. He spent seventeen years as a framer, building custom homes. But silver was, he says, "in his genes" — his paternal grandfather was a silversmith — and when he finally took it up as an adult, self-taught and through classes, it took. His grandfather had told him he'd have to live in a duality, traditional and modern at once; Coriz says that's true of his lifestyle and his silver both.

The Work

Coriz works primarily in turquoise and sterling, and the distinguishing thing about how he works is what he doesn't do: he doesn't sketch. He visualizes the finished piece directly from the stone — a framer's habit, seeing the structure before the first cut — and builds toward the image in his head. The result reads as both traditional and modern, which is exactly the line he says he was raised to walk. His ambitions run past silver, too: he wants to learn tufa and lost-wax casting, pottery, basketry, and traditional quilting, and he talks about a dream piece — a squash blossom depicting the Pueblo Revolt, carrying all the pueblos in one necklace — and about passing what he knows to his kids.

In Motion

You can watch Kevin work, in our own footage. He walks through building a turquoise ring start to finish, and demonstrates cuttlefish (cuttlebone) casting across two more sessions:

• Kevin Coriz — Cuttle Casting and Cuttlefish Casting Part II — his casting method, step by step.