Teddy Weahkee — Zuni Carver & Silversmith

c. 1890 – 1965, Zuni Pueblo. He dug up the old forms — and brought them back to life.

Teddy Weahkee was the only Zuni to volunteer for service in the First World War. He came home, taught himself silver, and by the early 1920s had a command of most jewelry techniques. But the work he's remembered for started in the ground. Weahkee took part in an archaeological excavation at Hawikuh, the ancient Zuni pueblo southwest of the reservation, and came face to face with the old Zuni forms — figures and carvings his ancestors had made centuries before. What he saw there he carried back to his bench. Alongside Leekya Deyuse, he became one of the very first Zuni artists to carve figures for sale to the outside world — a foundational move in a tradition that is now one of Zuni's most recognized.

The Maker

He got his schooling at the Phoenix Indian School and returned to the pueblo, learning silverwork largely on his own after the war. Like most Zuni artists of his generation, he sold through the trader C.G. Wallace and others — the trade ecosystem that carried early Zuni work to the wider market. He married Anna Lefthand, a Cheyenne beadworker, and with his daughter Edna Leki made turquoise-studded fetish pots; the family carried the craft forward. He was, by one account, a man of standing in more than art — reportedly serving for a time as Governor of Zuni Pueblo. And he ranged far past jewelry: from the 1920s into the 1950s he also painted in oils, rendered dance figures on deerskin, and built three-dimensional compositions — a breadth unusual for his time and place.

The Work

Weahkee worked mosaic inlay — stone laid on shell and on wood — and carved fetishes in the round, often from materials he gathered himself: Zuni rock, antler, basalt, with turquoise, exotic shell, and arrowheads bound on with real sinew. His imagery drew first on Zuni tradition, but reached into Hopi and Plains forms too, a wider iconographic range than most of his contemporaries worked. (No maker's-mark is documented for him — most of his output predates the 1950s, before Zuni artists commonly signed their work at all. His pieces are attributed by style and by provenance through the traders who sold them, not by a stamp — the same way Leekya Deyuse's work is identified. We name that rather than invent a mark.) Where his carving touches Zuni ceremonial figures, we describe the craft and leave the meaning to the Zuni people.

The Standing

Weahkee is counted among the foremost Zuni inlay artists and carvers of the 1930s through 1950s, credited with helping pioneer intricate twentieth-century Zuni inlay. The gallery owner and scholar Dr. Mark Sublette, writing on early Zuni silversmiths, places him in the small foundational cohort — with Leekya Deyuse and Dan Simplicio — whose jewelry work gives the Zuni tradition a depth beyond the fetish-and-pottery reputation it's usually known for. His work is held in museum collections including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.