Richard Chavez — San Felipe Pueblo Lapidary & His Marks

b. 1949, San Felipe Pueblo. The architect who traded blueprints for stone.

Richard Chavez builds jewelry the way an architect builds a room: nothing extra, every line deliberate, the whole thing balanced so precisely it looks inevitable. He is one of the great minimalists of Southwestern jewelry — and, fittingly, he trained as an architect before he ever became a full-time jeweler.

The Marks

Chavez signs his work with a maker's mark identifying him and his San Felipe Pueblo affiliation (recorded by dealers as "Richard Ch").

The Smith

He was born in 1949 at San Felipe Pueblo, one of the more traditional Pueblo communities along the Rio Grande. His grandfather taught him the old skills first — heishi, and the stringing of turquoise necklaces — and as a young man he made Olivella-shell heishi to help pay his way. But his path ran through the drafting table before it ran through the workbench.

Chavez trained as an architectural draftsman, studied at the University of New Mexico's School of Architecture, and in the early 1970s worked for architect Harvey S. Hoshour — himself trained under the Bauhaus master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe — even assisting on the design of Albuquerque's Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. When cheap imported heishi undercut his shell work, he taught himself silver and lapidary instead. In 1976, just nineteen credit-hours short of his architecture degree, he left school to make jewelry full time.

That decision has held for nearly fifty years. Today he works alongside his son Jared Chavez as Chavez Studio — Richard on the lapidary, Jared on the metal — a genuine two-generation collaboration that began with a shared necklace in 2011.

The Work

Chavez is a master of precision channel inlay. He does every step himself — the sketch, the stone selection, the cutting and grinding, the setting — fitting stone against stone so tightly the seams nearly vanish. Dealers describe the result as "practically seamless," a puzzle you can't quite see the joints of.

The architecture never left him. Every piece still begins as a carefully drawn diagram; his forms are clean, geometric, and quiet, in the spirit of Mies van der Rohe's "less is more." He moved early beyond turquoise-and-silver into unexpected stones — black jade, Siberian green jade, opal, tiger eye, fossilized ivory, lapis, sugilite, richly colored agates — often set in gold, with turquoise used as an accent rather than the star. He acknowledges the Hopi master Charles Loloma as a guiding influence on his generation.

His jewelry is deliberately non-representational — abstract, stone-driven, free of figures. As his gallery puts it, that choice keeps faith with the belief system of his San Felipe community. It's a value shaping an aesthetic, and we'll leave it there, as he does.

The Standing

Chavez arrived fully formed: Best of Show at the Eight Northern Pueblos show in 1976, his very first competition; a first-place ribbon at Santa Fe Indian Market in 1977; a SWAIA Fellowship in 1981. By 1990 he had stopped entering juried shows altogether, saying he no longer needed the validation. In 2018 the Heard Museum in Phoenix gave him the first career retrospective of his forty-plus years — "Symmetry in Stone: The Jewelry of Richard I. Chavez," with a companion book by curator Diana F. Pardue — and in 2024 his work appeared in R & Company's "Objects: USA" in New York.