Tommy Singer — Diné Silversmith & His Hallmarks

Thomas Singer's hallmark as photographed on an authenticated piece. © Turquoise Skies Inc.

Thomas "Tommy" Singer. b. Phoenix, AZ, 1938 (some sources say 1940) — d. May 31, 2014. The man who invented a technique the whole trade would copy.

Most silversmiths are remembered for a piece. Tommy Singer is remembered for a method. Working out of Winslow through the 1960s and '70s, he developed chip inlay — and did it so well that within a generation it had spread across the entire Navajo silver trade, imitated by more hands than anyone could count. That's a rare kind of legacy: not a signature object, but a way of working that outran his own name.

The Marks

Singer signed prolifically and in more than one form. The best-documented are a staggered "STC" and a stylized "T. Singer" or "Thomas Singer," alongside individual T, TC, and To stamps, and — on some pieces — an S paired with a crescent moon, the crescent opening toward the letter (a form longtime collectors have confirmed as genuine). After his death in 2014, his widow, Rosita "Rose" Singer, continued the workshop under "T&R Singer," so that mark postdates Tommy's own hand.

One caution, in the interest of the collector: a straight-line "STC" (as against the known staggered version) has circulated on cast work, and as of the most recent collector discussion its status — genuine variant or later fake — remained unresolved. We flag it rather than rule on it; where the paper trail stops, we say so.

The Smith

He was Diné, born in Phoenix in 1938 (a few sources give 1940 — the record isn't perfectly clean, and we won't pretend it is), and he learned at his father's bench. His father, Tsinnigine Hathali, a Navajo medicine man, put tools in his hands at seven. There was no art school in the story — this was the reservation apprenticeship model, one generation teaching the next directly. He worked from Winslow, Arizona, for most of his career, and died there in his home country in 2014, in a motorcycle accident near Blue Gap.

The Work

Chip inlay is the thing to understand. Where the older Zuni tradition set smooth, polished tiles of stone edge to edge, Singer set small chips of turquoise and coral into carved silver channels — a rougher, more painterly mosaic that reads as texture and color rather than precision tilework. He built it out in the 1960s and '70s, and it became one of the most widely imitated techniques in the whole industry, which is the truest measure of how good the original was. He also worked overlay and stamped silver, but chip inlay is the invention that carries his name.

The Standing

Singer's work sits in the permanent collection of the Gorman Museum at UC Davis — a cast bolo tie, held by an institution named for the Navajo painter Carl Gorman's son, R.C. Gorman, and dedicated to Native art. Retail and gallery sources widely repeat that he won "numerous Santa Fe Indian Market awards," but we could not source a specific, verifiable citation — a year, a category — so we leave it as an unconfirmed claim rather than dress it up as fact.