Lee Yazzie — Navajo Silversmith & Master Lapidary

Lee A. Yazzie. b. Vanderwagen, NM, 1946. The stone-cutter who set other men's stones before he signed his own.

Before Lee Yazzie's name meant anything to collectors, his hands were already in the finest work coming out of Gallup — cutting and setting stones for smiths whose names were famous while his was not. He came to silver sideways, left an accounting program to help support his mother, and turned out to have one of the great lapidary eyes of his generation. Today he is known as much for restraint as for skill: by his own account he makes no more than about ten pieces a year.

The Marks

Here we owe the collector honesty. Lee Yazzie's work is unmistakable in the hand — but a cleanly documented, illustrated personal hallmark is not reliably available in the public references we can check. One hallmark index lists an ambiguous "? Yazzie — may be L. Yazzie," which is the compiler themselves declining to commit; another names "Lee Yazzie" marks without a legible image. So we will not print a mark shape and call it certain. For a Yazzie piece, the surer authentication is provenance — gallery and museum records like the ones below — pending confirmation against a printed hallmark guide such as Hougart's. Where the record is thin, we say it is, rather than guess and be wrong.

The Smith

He was born in 1946 and raised in Vanderwagen, New Mexico, in a large family of traditional silversmiths — his brother Raymond C. Yazzie and sister Mary Marie Yazzie Lincoln are noted jewelers in their own right, which makes the family, not just the man, a chapter of Navajo jewelry history. Yazzie was studying accounting when a medical issue took him out of college; he picked up silversmithing to help support his mother, and stayed. His real schooling was Tanner's Indian Arts and Crafts Center in Gallup, 1970–1975, where he inlaid stones for established makers — among them Preston Monongye (whose own page is in this directory) — before building his own name. He trained his younger brother Raymond at that same bench.

The Work

Yazzie is a master lapidary first and a silversmith around it — the stone leads. He works traditional Navajo motifs "refined and embellished with his own style," cutting extensively in lapis lazuli and coral and setting them against 14k and 18k gold as often as sterling. The tell is precision: stone fitted to stone and metal with a jeweler's tolerance, at a deliberately low volume. Ten pieces a year is not a shortage — it's a standard. When a maker cuts that few, each one is meant to be a record of what he can do.

The Standing

His work is held by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board (U.S. Department of the Interior) and by the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, which holds a lapis bracelet of his from 1984 — lapis lazuli and 18k gold, accession no. 25/6257, a hard and citable museum record. He has shown at the Santa Fe Indian Market, the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market, and Tanner's Annual All-Indian Invitational, and collector accounts credit repeated Best of Show wins at the Gallup Inter-Tribal Ceremonial (the specific years we could not confirm, so we count them cautiously). In 2014–16 the NMAI built a whole exhibition around his family — Glittering World — the best single measure of the Yazzies' place in the field. You can explore the Smithsonian's Glittering World: Navajo Jewelry of the Yazzie Family, some three hundred pieces, and see the tradition he came out of.