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Charles Loloma’s very own personal

Charles Loloma Desert Ironwood, silver and turquoise jewelry sculpture, c.1980

ex: Charles Loloma Personal Collection, Hotevilla, AZ

We have had quite a few pieces by Charles Loloma over the past 40 plus years, but never one like this for the very simple reason that this is the only one he ever made like this. This extraordinary three-dimensional jewelry sculpture is just six inches tall, but it looks absolutely monumental. It shows very clearly that small can be really big if the idea, the artistry and the execution are all as large as they are here. If you didn’t have another object to compare this piece to for scale, you might imagine it was six or sixty feet tall so huge is its artistic and visual impact. It’s kind of like a miniature Hopi Stonehenge monolith, if you will, and more on that later.

Charles Loloma was an extraordinary artistic polymath and prodigy along the lines of Michelangelo and Picasso.

He began his artistic career at a very tender teenage age while still in high school as an astonishingly capable painter, muralist and draftsman in the  late 1930’s and 40’s. he then became an outstanding pottery maker for a number of years in the 1950’s before transitioning completely to jewelry making in the late 1950’s and 1960’s. Jewelry, of course is three-dimensional sculpture making on a smaller scale and from time to time, as with this piece, Loloma made a few other more purely sculptural pieces in wood, ceramic and silver, some of which, like this piece, can be seen as shown below in the late Loloma scholar and friend, Martha H. Struever’s (1931-2017) excellent book “Loloma, Beauty is his Name”, Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe 2005.

The Sonoran Desert Ironwood Tree (Olneya tesota)

Photo source and © Arizona Sonora Desert Museum

“If there is beauty in a piece of art, a person can absorb it and become more beautiful.”

-Charles Loloma

As a fitting and fascinating to contemplate memorial statuary project as shown in the projections above, we would love to see this obelisk used as a sculptural maquette or study for a commissioned, say 10-15 foot tall, completely faithful monumental rendition of it in textured structural steel or cast bronze, iron or carved stone and colored glass or ceramic composite for the turquoise stone to be prominently installed in the courtyard or lobby of one of the Southwest’s leading Native Arts Museums such as The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture or The Wheelwright Museum

in Santa Fe or the Heard Museum in Phoenix or The Institute of American Indian Arts sculpture garden also in Santa Fe where Charles Loloma was on the faculty for years, as a most fitting memorial tribute to and remembrance of Charles Loloma and his major significance and importance to the world of Native American Art and artists. Two other very interesting possible locations for this installation would be The Hopi Cultural Center Courtyard on The Hopi Second Mesa or in front of The old Loloma Studio in Hotevilla Village on The Hopi Third Mesa.

There are literally thousands of Charles Loloma jewelry pieces in the world; a great many various bracelets, rings, necklaces, pendants, earrings, belt buckles, etc., but there is only one precious one of these. This singular piece is a timelessly beautiful, completely unique and extremely rare original jewelry sculpture from the brilliant mind and skilled hands and the private personal collection of this world-renowned Native American jewelry artist. Charles Loloma liked and valued this sculpture so highly that he always kept it and never sold it. Need we say more? Ideally, of course, this sculpture should be in (and possibly also in front of) a great American museum (Are you listening, Museums on our mailing list?) or in the hands of a dedicated collector who might possibly one day donate it to one of these museums.

Price available upon request

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PROVENANCE:

The Artist, Hotevilla, AZ, c. 1980

Charles Loloma Private Collection, Hotevilla, AZ, c. 1980-1991

By descent to:

Georgia Voisard Loloma Collection, Phoenix, AZ and Santa Fe, NM, 1991-2022

Fine Arts of the Southwest, Inc., Santa Fe, NM, 2022-present

Exhibited:

“Loloma, Beauty Is His Name”, Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Santa Fe, NM, 2005

Published:

“Loloma, Beauty Is His Name” by Martha H Struever, Wheelwright

Museum of the American Indian, Santa Fe, NM 2005, pp.127

This sculpture is made of a large, asymmetrically-shaped piece of deep brown Sonoran Desert Ironwood, an extraordinarily beautiful, fine-grained and, as befits it name, extremely hard, dense wood which grows only in the Southwestern Sonoran Desert. Loloma used this precious and difficult to work with material extensively in many of his jewelry creations often in conjunction with silver and turquoise precisely as he did here. The beautiful, penetrating blue oval-shaped, high-domed cabochon turquoise stone is from Arizona’s famed Morenci turquoise mine just outside the small town of Safford, some 165 miles Southeast of Phoenix.

This beautiful stone is beautifully set in an old-style “foldover” type silver bezel near the top of the ironwood obelisk like a giant blue eye overlooking all. The ironwood sculpture is carved in a somewhat angular manner with numerous smooth facets and planes around it, but there is one area at the bottom of one side which interestingly is very delicately carved and textured in a manner that resembles folds in fabric or cloth which is somewhat mysteriously suggestive of the figure wearing a robe or cloak. Overall, the entire piece is very finely and preciously finished with a marvelous textural and visual contrast between smoothly finished areas and roughly textured natural areas, which, interestingly, is a technique Loloma also used quite often in making his cast silver jewelry pieces.

Four Charles Loloma sculptural pieces illustrated in Martha Struever's 2005 book, "Loloma, Beauty Is His Name", Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe, NM, 2005.

We have four original unopened First-Edition hardcover copies of this long out-of-print book available. They are all in pristine, brand-new condition still in their

original plastic shrink wrap. Price is $275 per copy plus $25.00 for insured USPS Priority Mail shipping in the continental U.S. For more information, please click here.

Left and right photo sources and © Martha H. Struever “Loloma, Beauty Is His Name”, Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Santa Fe, 2005.

The sculpture is an extremely powerful and highly precious piece at the same time. The sculpture’s provenance is straight line perfect. It was in Charles Loloma’s own personal private collection from the day he created it around 1980 until his untimely death in 1991 when it passed by descent to his second wife, Georgia Voisard Loloma who kept it for the next thirty years plus until her death in 2021 after which we acquired it from her estate. The sculpture or obelisk was exhibited in The Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe’s seminal Charles Loloma retrospective exhibition in 2005 and it was also featured in Loloma scholar, Martha H. Struever’s 2005 exhibition catalog entitled “Loloma, Beauty Is His Name”, Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe, 2005, where it is pictured on page 127.

The precise dimensions of the sculpture are 6" in height and 3 1/2" in width at the widest point and about 3" in depth.

The sculpture weighs 253 grams or 9 ounces and is signed “Loloma” in the artist’s beautifully engraved signature at

the lower left edge. It is in completely excellent original condition and especially so for its 45 or so years of age.