Michael Kabotie — Hopi Silversmith, "Lomawywesa" & His Mark

Michael Kabotie, 1942–2009. Shungopavi, Second Mesa. The painter's son who added a third layer to Hopi overlay.

Michael Kabotie was born into the tradition at its source: his father, Fred Kabotie, was the pre-eminent Hopi painter of his generation and one of the two men who co-developed Hopi silver overlay itself in the postwar Guild. Most sons of a master inherit the method and keep it. Michael took the two-layer overlay his father helped invent and built a third layer onto it — a technique galleries call his "triple-overlay," raising the work off the metal into something closer to sculpture. As the College Art Association put it, he "modified Hopi overlay into three-dimensional pieces, a process most Hopi jewelers would never attempt." He was a painter and a poet who treated silver like a canvas with depth.

The Smith

He was born September 3, 1942, at Shungopavi, on Second Mesa, into the Snow Clan, son of Fred Kabotie and Alice, a basket weaver. In 1967, at his manhood initiation into the Wuwutsim Society, he was given the Hopi name Lomawywesa — "Walking in Harmony" — the name he used to sign both his paintings and his jewelry ever after.

He learned overlay as a teenager, from his father and from the Hotevilla silversmith Wallie Sekayumptewa. But the mentor who set his direction was the Cochiti/San Ildefonso painter Joe Herrera, whom he met at a summer art program and who introduced him to the ancient Awatovi kiva murals — the imagery that would drive both his canvases and his silver for the rest of his life. After a 1966 solo show at the Heard Museum launched his painting career, he left an engineering program to make art full time. In 1973 he co-founded Artist Hopid, a five-member collective reinterpreting Hopi art in contemporary forms, published a book of poems, and for twenty-six years — from 1983 until his death in 2009 — taught Hopi silversmithing at Idyllwild Arts in California.

The Work

Standard Hopi overlay is two sheets of silver: a design sawn from the top layer, the recessed layer beneath it oxidized dark. Kabotie's triple-overlay adds a third worked layer, and with stampwork, chisel, etching, and cut-out tapered panels he pushed it toward the sculptural — one 2001 bracelet was built "like a box, squared and hollow, an astounding construction feat." His design vocabulary came straight off his painting: motifs from the Awatovi kiva murals and Sikyatki pottery, clouds and rain and the San Francisco Peaks. Critics reached for Picasso and Braque to describe the cubist energy of it; Kabotie said he'd never heard of them when his style formed, and pointed instead to his ancestral Puebloan sources.

Some of that work draws directly on katsina imagery and Hopi cosmology — the San Francisco Peaks as the home of the katsina spirit beings — as his own acknowledged subject matter. We describe these as he and his galleries and museums have publicly; the ceremonial meaning behind them belongs to the Hopi people, and the content of the Wuwutsim initiation that gave him his name is theirs to keep.

The Mark

Kabotie signed his silver with his Hopi name, "Lomawywesa," in a cursive hand — the same name he signed his paintings with (documented by Fine Arts of the Southwest on individual pieces). Collectors should know he used more than one mark over his career; a shorthand initial mark is also documented, so the cursive "Lomawywesa" is not the only signature you'll find on his work.

The Standing

Kabotie's work is held in the permanent collection of the Heard Museum (which named him a Signature Artist in 2010, and whose Berlin Gallery gate he designed in the style of his overlay), and his monumental silver installation, the "Silver Room of Awatovi," traveled in the American Museum of Natural History's exhibition Totems to Turquoise. He designed the front gate of the Museum of Northern Arizona, co-painted major murals there, lectured internationally, and was named an Arizona Indian Living Treasure. He showed at Santa Fe Indian Market through the 1980s and 1990s, and his line runs on through a large family of artists.