GOOD MEDICINE
Native American Art Magazine|December - January 2021
Navajo jeweler Boyd Tsosie brings his life and culture into his art.
Michael Clawson
GOOD MEDICINE

Sometimes it pays to have good neighbors.In the late 1960s, Boyd Tsosie, then a 13-year-old high school student in Many Farms, Arizona, lived four houses down from famous jeweler Kenneth Begay. “He was teaching in Chinle at the Navajo Community College at the time. I was a freshman who was also going to school in Chinle,” Tsosie remembers. “Every now and then I would see him outside, so I introduced myself and he told me to experiment on anything I could get my hands on. All I had at the time was one of those butane handheld torches. But whatever Kenneth told me to do that’s what I would do.”

With periodic, and impromptu, instruction from Begay, Tsosie got to work with any materials he could scrape together. The largely self-taught artist proceeded until he was 19 years old and then “it became a desperation to make jewelry,” he says. “That’s when I really started. I didn’t like traditional jewelry and I was very self-conscious, so no one ever saw some of my first pieces. Mostly what I would do was replicate other works. Later, Arizona Highways started making their jewelry issues and that’s where I really discovered what jewelry could be. I would see pieces by Lee Yazzie or Preston [Monongye] or Charles Loloma. This is what I needed to see.”

This story is from the December - January 2021 edition of Native American Art Magazine.

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This story is from the December - January 2021 edition of Native American Art Magazine.

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