Steve LaRance & Marian Denipah — A Husband-and-Wife Studio & Their Marks

Steve LaRance (Hopi, b. 1958) and Marian Denipah (Navajo / Ohkay Owingeh Tewa). Two peoples, one of the oldest techniques in the Southwest.

Steve LaRance and Marian Denipah married across two nations — he is Hopi, she is Navajo and Ohkay Owingeh Tewa — and built one studio around one demanding method: tufa casting. It's among the oldest metalworking techniques in the Southwest, and the least forgiving. You carve your design in reverse into a block of soft volcanic ash, bind the mold, pour in molten silver or gold — and the mold usually breaks coming apart. Every finished piece is a one-off because the thing that made it no longer exists. Two painters who found their way to metal, they've spent a career pouring pieces that can't be repeated.

The Smiths

Steve LaRance was born in 1958 in Phoenix and raised in the Hopi community of Moencopi, of the Sun Clan, as his gallery biography gives it. He learned the traditional Hopi arts as a boy — carving, bow-making, silverwork — and his very first piece of jewelry was a bow guard he made to wear. Painting and stone sculpture came first as a career. Our sources disagree on whether he studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Pardue writes that “He and Denipah each studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe” (Pardue 2007, p. 40) ^[3], while Bahti quotes Steve himself: “I never knew about [IAIA]. I might have gone there if I had known about it” (Bahti 2007, p. 76). ^[1]

Marian Denipah was born in Tucson, her father from the Navajo Nation and her mother from Ohkay Owingeh (San Juan Pueblo). She trained in painting, photography, and dance at IAIA and earned a Fine Arts degree from Northern Arizona University, and she still paints. She came to metal through a reciprocal apprenticeship with the Navajo silversmith Ric Charlie — one of the acknowledged masters of tufa casting — she helping him with his painting, he teaching her to cast. The two met at an art show and settled at Ohkay Owingeh.

The Work

The material itself carries a lineage. Steve gathers his own tufa from the Hopi Reservation — and not just anywhere: "I was able to find the site where Charles Loloma used to get his tufa," he says. "It is finer-grained than that found elsewhere." That's a direct material thread back to the most influential Hopi jeweler of the century. Steve's designs draw on the Hopi symbols and imagery he grew up making — spirals, petroglyphs, water signs — worked with modern texture and clean lines, and he still sculpts in alabaster and marble besides.

Marian calls her pieces "little paintings in stone." Her motifs run to petroglyphs, dragonflies, butterflies, hummingbirds, and turtles, set with turquoise, coral, lapis, and less-expected stones like amethyst and peridot — and she likes a secret: many of her bracelets carry an etched hummingbird hidden on the inside, where only the wearer will ever find it.

Their Marks

Steve signs with his Hopi name, "Wikviya," paired with a Sun symbol for his Sun Clan, as his gallery biography gives it.

The Standing

Steve received a Smithsonian Artist Fellowship in 2004, and his work is shown at the National Museum of the American Indian; over a thirty-year career he's exhibited internationally and sits on the boards of the Museum of Northern Arizona, SWAIA, and other Arizona cultural institutions. Both artists have shown at the Heard Museum's Indian Fair & Market and were profiled together in the Heard's 2011 program on their design partnership. Steve is also a co-founder of the Lightning Boy Foundation, a New Mexico nonprofit supporting Native youth in traditional hoop dance and the arts — support their work. And the craft carries on at home: their son Cree LaRance is a working jeweler who now co-teaches Southwest metalsmithing workshops alongside his father.