Ingmars Lindbergs
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Property from the Barbara Rogers and H. Wade Stinson Collection
Lot 76
A Lee Yazzie ring
16 September 2019, 11:00 PDT
Los AngelesSold for US$956.25 inc. premium
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Lee Yazzie
Navajo, (b. 1946), a silver ring centering a turquoise cabochon surrounded by four applied silver balls and four smaller bezel-set cabochons, each side of the shank with stamped leaves in triplicate.
size 8 1/2, width 7/8in
size 8 1/2, width 7/8in
Footnotes
Provenance
Per the collector's notes, purchased directly from the artist at SWAIA, Santa Fe, NM, August 1975
Lee Yazzie is deliberate and exacting with every piece of jewelry he designs; his perfectionism means that his production time is much longer than that of other artists, making his work relatively difficult to find. In Lois Sherr Dubin's Glittering World: Navajo Jewelry of the Yazzie Family (Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, 2014), she describes how the artist thinks of his rings as "miniature bracelets": "His sense of space is brilliantly demonstrated in his rings... On these tiny canvases, he displays the essence of his artistry with a density of designs and integrated details that most jewelers cannot achieve on a larger buckle or pendant" (p. 129). Yazzie uses precise measurements to determine stone placement and size, working from the center of a piece outward, and will often delay working on commissions until the perfect stones are found (Ibid. 130). The two examples offered in this catalogue illustrate Yazzie's technical mastery, each featuring beautifully cut, high quality turquoise cabochons in perfectly symmetrical placement.