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A beautiful matched pair of vintage
Navajo Arts and Crafts Guild long silver “Cocktail” spoons, c.1940’s-50’s
If you weren’t born with one of them you know where, you’ll just have to buy one, or even better buy these two.
These vintage Navajo Arts and Crafts Guild silver spoons are beautiful, functional objects as well as beautiful, culturally significant pieces of Southwestern art and history and you can thoroughly enjoy them in both capacities.
The Navajo Arts and Crafts Guild was created in 1941 by The Navajo Tribal authority under the inspired leadership of the brilliant Navajo silversmiths, Ambrose Roanhorse and Chester Yellowhair. These spoons are fully representative of the Navajo Guild’s combination of a streamlined Modernist design aesthetic with minimal or no use of set stones and applied decoration and completely traditional Navajo means of manufacture, handmade by a skilled Navajo silversmith using only strictly traditional methods. To find out more about the Navajo Arts and Crafts Guild, please click here.
As for exactly which particular skilled Navajo silversmith made them that must remain a mystery because Navajo Guild regulations forbid the use of individual artists hallmarks on NACG silverwork, only the Guild’s official "Horned Sun" hallmark could be used and it proudly appears on the back of both of these spoons. If we had to make an educated guess as to which of the Guild’s all-star team of silversmiths made them our first guess would be Ambrose Roanhorse himself and our second guess would be Kenneth Begay. And whoever it was that made them, he made them just perfectly, with a beautiful sinuous, sculptural curving shape and finely tapered form decorated just perfectly with a beautiful pattern of applied chisel work at the ends.
The spoons each measure a very nicely-sized 7 1/4" in length and they are 7/8" in width at their widest points across the bowl of the spoon. They each weigh 31 grams or 1 1/8 ounce and they are both in remarkably excellent original condition with some small degree of wear from use, particularly in light of their 75-or so years of age, and the silver has acquired a fine soft patina from age and use. As previously mentioned, each spoon is proudly signed on the back with the Navajo Arts and Crafts Guild’s distinctive trademark "Horned Sun" insignia and is also marked "NAVAJO".
You can stir your drinks with them, you can display them and you can gaze upon them in admiration of their beauty
and artistry, but first, before all that you will have to buy them. So what are you waiting for?
Price $925
At left, Kenneth Begay, c. 1950's. At right, Navajo Guild Co-Founder and Director, Ambrose Roanhorse, c. 1940's. At center, The Navajo Guild's "Horned Sun" insignia at one of its present-day outlets in Cameron, Arizona.
Left photo source and © Arizona Republic.
