A CONVERSATION WITH SECOND-GENERATION JEWELRY ARTIST JONATHAN MCKINNEY, RESPONSIBLE FOR THE SOURCING, SHAPING, AND SETTING OF THE GEMSTONES FEATURED IN THE LAST FRONTIER V JEWELRY COLLECTION.
There is a rich history of silversmithing and lapidary arts in the American West. Though jewelry-making existed long before, it is believed silversmithing first came to the American Southwest in the mid-19th century. The Navajo are credited with being the first Indigenous peoples to work with silver, and are thought to have gained these skills from Mexican or Spaniard blacksmiths, adapting techniques to suit softer metals.
THE ART OF INLAY
There is a rich history of silversmithing and lapidary arts in the American West. Though jewelry-making existed long before, it is believed silversmithing first came to the American Southwest in the mid-19th century. The Navajo are credited with being the first Indigenous peoples to work with silver, and are thought to have gained these skills from Mexican or Spaniard blacksmiths, adapting techniques to suit softer metals.
The Navajo people shared their skills with neighboring tribes such as the Pueblo, Zuni, and Hopi, and the number of Native American men and women engaged in silversmithing and lapidary work steadily increased as the twentieth century progressed. By the 1960s, Native American silver and turquoise jewelry was renowned around the world.
Since the launch of the Last Frontier collection, Jacques Marie Mage has incorporated into our eyewear and jewelry different turquoises from some of the oldest and highest producing mines in North America. Long considered a material that brings good health, good fortune, and protection from evil, the stones’ tendency to change color (ranging from white to sky blue to navy blue to a yellow-green) depending on the environment, light, dust, and one’s skin acidity lends this semi-precious gemstone a mystical, almost sentient quality.Every piece is unique, increasingly rare, and has its own story.
Our turquoise is sourced, cut, shaped, and set by Albuquerque-based jeweler and artist Jonathan McKinney, a second-generation jeweler whose mother was born and raised in Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States.
Albuquerque is a unique place with deep history; human settlement in the area has probably spanned 10,000 years. Before the Navajo and Apache arrived in the 15th century, a Pueblo Indian civilization had existed, spanning from 700 AD to the 13th century. The Ancestral Puebloans lived in a range of structures that included small family pit houses, larger structures to house clans, grand pueblos, and cliff-sited dwellings for defense. They had a complex network linking hundreds of communities and population centers across the present-day Four Corners region, and held a distinct knowledge of celestial sciences that informed their agricultural practices and architecture.
Spaniards from Mexico claimed the area for Spain in the 16th century, explored in 1540 by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. It became part of Mexico in 1821 and was ceded to the U.S. in 1848 at the end of the Mexican-American War. Today, New Mexico is a blend of multiple cultures—Native American (there are 23 Indian tribes located in New Mexico), Hispanic American, and Anglo-American. “That’s kind of like the ever-present reality here,” says McKinney. “And each community makes their own cultural contributions to what makes up New Mexico. Yeah, so I definitely grew up in and around that.”
McKinney began making Native American jewelry in his teens, taught by his father and inspired by his great-aunt Lucy Lewis (1895-1992), an acclaimed pottery artist from Acoma Pueblo who was instrumental in reviving eleventh-century, Mimbres-style pottery, characterized by black lines on white slip.Lewis’s pottery first became known outside the pueblo in 1950, when she received a blue ribbon at the annual Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial in New Mexico, the same event McKinney would participate in many decades later as a young artist.
Now, after stints with Judith Ripka Fine Jewelry and Van Cleef & Arpels, as well as a couple successful family-owned jewelry businesses (one of which he sold to the Navajo Nation), McKinney now occupies a unique space within the world of fine Native American jewelry, his decades of dedication to the beauty of gemstones and the art of the inlay allowing him to drive projects from sourcing through production. Part project manager, part artisan, McKinney not only has in-depth knowledge of North America's great mines, but is capable of using his array of different diamond saws to cut, grind, and shape the stones into beautiful jewelry-ready cabochons; then expertly set them in the jewelry's channel with epoxy; and then carefully hand-polish the gemstone with a polishing lathe.
Here, McKinney reveals the complex nature and delicate process of sourcing and preparing the many different types of turquoise incorporated into the eyewear and jewelry of JMM’s Last Frontier collection…
AP:: How do you go about acquiring turquoise?
JM: I'll start by kinda figuring out approximately how much material is needed based on the size of the piece and the projected number of pieces that we're gonna need. Then I would figure out if it's realistic – if the material's even available, in what quantities, and what cost. So for instance, with the Kingman Turquoise, that's a really easy, straightforward type of material to source because the mine is fairly prolific, so that type of material is generally readily available either directly from the mine or secondary sources. Now, if you're talking about something like Lone Mountain Turquoise, generally that is only gonna be available directly from the mine, and there's really not a lot of secondary sources. And if you're looking at a secondary source, it's gonna be very, very expensive. That's because in the world of collectible turquoise, Lone Mountain has a very high reputation, like I would say it's in the top five mines around the world.
AP::Once you have the turquoise, what's the process of turning it into a cabochon?
JM:The first thing that you have to realize is that you have to cut it to shape, and typically you're cutting from an irregular, spherical shape that looks like a meteor. You're trying to cut like a specific round shape or a rectangular shape, so the initial thing that happens is that I'm having to spend a lot of time searching through the stones, making sure that things look right and that I can get the right size for the piece. Then I'll cut the material into flat slabs, and from there, you'll just be cutting again and again to try and fit like a general shape. At that point, you're having to carefully grind away material, hoping that as you remove layers, the stone doesn't lose what makes it special.
AP::And what makes a selection of turquoise special?
JM:As I'm selecting and cutting the material, I'm keeping an eye on what's called the matrix, which is like the interplay between the mother rock and the turquoise. That interplay is what creates the webbing that's prized among collectors, and some turquoises become very expensive because of the mother rock that it's joined to. So when I'm fitting for a project, I'm also looking for a certain fineness, a balance among the materials and the colors of the stone. This is incredibly tricky because as you cut through the material, that balance can change. The layer just half a millimeter below the surface can look drastically different than what's above or below it.
