Larry Golsh — Pala Mission / Cherokee Jeweler & His Mark

Lawrence C. "Larry" Golsh, b. 1941. Pala Mission and Cherokee. The architect who built jewelry.

Larry Golsh didn't come to the bench from a family of silversmiths. He came from architecture. He studied it, with a sculptor's emphasis, at Arizona State, and from 1968 to 1972 he apprenticed on Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti — the visionary experimental desert city — carrying its structural, monumental sensibility with him. Then he did something almost no traditional Native jeweler of his era did: he trained in Western fine jewelry, became the first Native American to study at the Gemological Institute of America, and spent twelve years working alongside a French master goldsmith. What he built out of all that is a rare fusion — traditional tufa casting married to gemological precision — that got him grouped, in the pages of Forbes, with Charles Loloma himself.

The Smith

He was born in 1941, his father of the Pala Band of Mission Indians in Southern California, his mother Cherokee, and he grew up near the Pala reservation outside San Diego. The rock art in the hills and canyons there — ancient petroglyphs and pictographs — lodged in him early and became, decades later, the source of his designs. At ASU the sculptor Ben Goo encouraged him; on the Arcosanti project he learned to think at architectural scale. The turn to jewelry came in 1969, when he met the Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma, whom he credits as the inspiration to begin. He learned silversmithing in the early 1970s and then worked for twelve years with the French jeweler Pierre Touraine, absorbing European gemstone-setting and goldsmithing — the same Old World bench that shaped Charles Supplee and Harvey Begay.

The Work

Golsh's signature is tufa casting in high-karat gold — the old Southwestern lost-form method, in which a design is carved into volcanic stone and molten metal poured in, but worked in 18k gold as often as silver and set with serious gemstones: diamonds, lapis, coral, onyx, and a favorite, Russian charoite. His forms are abstract and sculptural, drawn from the rock art of his childhood canyons — the architect's structural eye and the gemologist's precision brought to a traditional casting technique. It's that combination that sets him apart: not turquoise-and-silver in the old vocabulary, but cast, gem-forward, fine-jewelry work with a Native casting method at its heart. Forbes, in a piece titled "American Fabergé," said of Golsh and Loloma that they had "attained a whole new aesthetic level… their style is now fully international."

The Standing

Golsh has received two National Endowment for the Arts grants and was the subject of a PBS documentary on his work. His tufa-cast, natural-turquoise bracelets made the cover of American Indian Art Magazine in 1976, and his jewelry is documented in the standard references of the field — Dexter Cirillo's Southwestern Indian Jewelry, Jerry Jacka's Beyond Tradition, and Lois Dubin's North American Indian Jewelry and Adornment. His work is held at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian. Among the generation that carried Native jewelry onto the international stage, Golsh is the one who came in through architecture and gemology — and made the tufa cast speak that language.