CLEAN LINES inspired by nature
NATIVE TREASURES HONOREE MARIA SAM ORA
Maria Samora wasn’t particularly artistic as a child. She grew up in Taos and spent many weekends going to craft fairs with her mother, a jeweler and seamstress, to help sell their wares. “But I was at the age where I was disinterested,” Samora said. It was only many years later, after her mother had sold most of her jewelrymaking equipment, that she realized her future was in the same medium. “It was kind of comical. My brother is the one who went off to art school at the Institute of American Indian Arts. I didn’t feel like I really had it in me. It was something I discovered later in life.”
Samora has been making jewelry in Taos for 20 years and is the 2018 Museum of Indian Arts and Culture Living Treasure and Native Treasures featured artist. It is the 14th annual Native Treasures show; a ceremony honoring Samora takes place at the pre-show celebration on Friday, May 25, with the art market continuing at the Santa Fe Convention Center on Saturday and Sunday. Last year’s Living Treasure, sculptor Jody Naranjo of Santa Clara Pueblo, presents Samora with an original piece of art during the ceremony. An exhibition of Samora’s work — Maria Samora: A Master of Elegance — is on display at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture through February 2019.
The Living Treasure designation is bestowed upon a Native artist with a significant body of work who is in the midst of a thriving career. Samora is known for combining gold and silver in exactingly detailed designs that are both architectural and organic, with clean-lined nature-inspired shapes. Karen Freeman, one of the founders of Native Treasures, said that Samora has mastered elegance and simplicity. “Her work is deceptively simple and drop- dead gorgeous. She’s meticulous. I don’t think she lets anything out of her studio that she doesn’t feel good about.”
Samora’s mother came to Taos from Indiana to visit the Llama Foundation in the early 1970s. She met Frank Samora, a sixty-nine-year- old man from Taos Pueblo on whom Frank Waters had based his novel The Man Who Killed the Deer (1942), and they had a baby together. “My mom was like twenty-seven when she had me. It was definitely an interesting family dynamic,” Samora said. “My dad was very much involved with the pueblo, a spiritual leader and very committed. But there were some conflicts with my mother being white and my father having another family at the pueblo. Because of all that, we pretty much lived on the outskirts. We were primarily raised by my mother, although my father was always in the picture.”
As a student at Pitzer College in California, Samora enjoyed her photography classes but was disinterested in other aspects of the small liberal arts school. “I decided to travel with my friends and do photography on the road. I had every intention of going back to school, but after traveling it didn’t feel quite right,” she said. She returned to Taos for a bit and then took classes at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque for a couple of semesters — but she didn’t feel comfortable at such a big institution, so she moved back to Taos and started waiting tables.
“This was right when the UNM branch was opening here, and my friend and I decided to take a jewelrymaking class. I did that for a few semesters but I didn’t think it was going anywhere. Then I heard about this guy, Phil Poirier, a master goldsmith from Taos who was teaching a weeklong intensive through the Taos Institute of Art. I got a scholarship. On the first day, I was completely blown away by his knowledge and expertise. By the third day, I’d built up the courage to ask if I could work with him.”
The matte-finish sterling silver “mountain range” cuff is elegant enough for a formal occasion but would be equally at home on the wrist of a punk rocker in a mosh pit.
She knew that if she wanted to make jewelry at a professional level, she needed to learn from this man. Academics had always been a struggle for Samora, but Poirier seemed to know exactly how to teach her. He started her on the basics, which included cleaning his shop as well as soldering and filing metal for hours on end. “That apprenticeship went on for about 15 years and is still pretty ongoing. He’s become a father figure to me, really taken me under his wing, and provided so much more than just learning about jewelry. I have my own studio now, but we still work together pretty regularly.”
Among the newer items available on mariasamora.com is an oxidized sterling silver and 18k-gold pyramid link bracelet that is delicate yet hefty, modern yet ancient, as if it could be for sale at the finest jewelry store in Manhattan or dug up by archaeologists in Egypt. The mattefinish sterling silver “mountain range” cuff is elegant enough for a formal occasion but would be equally at home on the wrist of a punk rocker in a mosh pit. For her sterling silver Strata line, she has been playing with two parallel lines in rings, earrings, and pendants. She is working on a sunflower piece for Native Treasures, which she will likely expand into a small line for SWAIA Indian Market in August. (She first participated in Indian Market in 2005; in 2009, she was selected as the poster artist for the annual event.) “I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned [publicly] that Sunflower is my Indian name,” she said.
When asked how she developed her personal aesthetic, she said it was a difficult question because her style comes naturally to her and she is inspired by so many things. She was surrounded by traditional Native American jewelry when she was growing up, and though she loves and appreciates that stuff, she said, “I think I subconsciously wanted to go in a completely different direction and be contemporary or whatever.”
An element of Southwest style isn’t entirely absent from her pieces, but it is not the overriding feature. Many of her pieces are accented with small precious and semiprecious stones, from diamonds to lapis lazuli to turquoise and rose quartz. Her lines are always limited edition, which is more of a default position than a purposeful business practice. “I get bored easily,” she said. For a while she was known for her keum-boo, which is a Korean gilding technique used to apply thin sheets of gold to silver. She made a variety of pieces in this silver-gilt, including a stunning evening bag with a pink silk lining — which is the kind of extravagant, time-intensive project she said is difficult to take on now that she has children. Her family also includes her husband — the writer and artist Kevin Rebholtz — as well as a dog, a cat, and some chickens. Their studio is within walking distance from their house, which allows the kids to come and go relatively freely, but Samora’s work schedule tends to be organized around their school hours.
“I find that things have to be structured around them now because they are definitely my priority,” she said. “Times have changed, but in a very sweet way.”