LIFELONG JOURNEY TO DISCOVER HISTORY
Folk Art Market jeweler draws inspiration from the past
Artist’s Native Americanstyle jewelry inspired by quest for relics of the past.
Federico Jimenez discovered the excitement of a treasure hunt in his back yard in the tiny village of Tututepec, Mexico.
The teenager and his father were repairing the foundation of their ancestral home when they unearthed a big pot. Inside they found a pre-Columbian Mixtec Indian chest ornament with strands of turquoise, gold and shell that had been secretly buried by his family. He learned his village had been the capital city of the kingdom of the Mixtecs and that his great-grandfather had likely been their chief. The Mixtecs are Indigenous people of Mesoamerica.
Jimenez’s appetite for antiquities grew, sending him scurrying from village to village in search of more.
The artist will be bringing his own Native American-inspired jewelry to the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe. Organizers will allow 200 visitors entry every two hours from July 7-18 on Milner Plaza on Museum Hill. Last year’s market was canceled due to the pandemic. Pre-COVID, it lured a crowd of about 21,000. Masks will be mandatory and all the artists will be tested for COVID-19 before entering.
Since that youthful discovery, Jimenez has organized exhibitions and acquired items for institutions, including the University of California/Los Angeles Museum of Cultural History and Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art. He displays many of his own pieces in Mexico City’s anthropological
museum and has launched his own folk art museum in Oaxaca.
Today Jimenez is a renowned authority on Mexican silver, preColumbian and Mixtec jewelry. He began designing his own jewelry in 1972, using turquoise from New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada. The designs range from soft and colorful floral settings to dramatic, free-form stone designs.
That trajectory began when village officials kicked Jimenez out of their town when he was 14 for accidentally burning a nativity.
“It was an accident, but they didn’t like it,” he said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles. “I didn’t (go to) confession, and that was a big deal in the village.”
His family sent him to a military boarding school. Next he earned a bachelor’s degree in science and art at the University of Benito Juarez in Oaxaca.
Jimenez moved to L.A. in 1967, taking classes in jewelry making and design. He joined the protests for American Indians and the Chicano movement, picketing alongside such activists as Dennis Banks and the labor leader César Chávez.
He noticed the hippies bedecked in American Indian jewelry.
“I didn’t want to work in a factory, so I learned jewelry,” he said. “I was intrigued. Whatever I could make, I sold it.”
His aspirations clicked when he visited the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos in 1974. He became a board member a year later.
“I fell in love with that museum,” he said. “I could touch all that jewelry. I started making things similar.”
Jimenez based his Frida Kahlo designs on the artist who wore mounds of Mexican Indian jewelry. Laced with filigree, it often features rosettes, hearts and birds, as well as turquoise. He also incorporates spiny oyster shell, garnets and opals into his work.
“I love more than anything else the stones,” Jimenez said. “I think (turquoise) is very spiritual for me. At the Taos Pueblo, the governor told me a lot of stories about turquoise. He wore a bracelet with broken stones. He said the stones cracked, saving him from a heart attack. Turquoise has been giving me the style of life I have now.”
Jimenez’s work hangs from the necks of such celebrities as Cher, Catherine Deneuve, Ali MacGraw, Joni Mitchell, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith.
Now he donates $5,000 a year to the Folk Art Market to help upcoming artists.
“I was very poor and I know what that’s all about,” he said. “For them, it’s a luxury.”
An artist from India thanked him because the grant supplied a new water well for his village. A Peruvian artist used the money to buy tools for his studio.
Diminutive in size, with jet black hair and distinctly Native features, Jimenez will no doubt be wearing an embroidered shirt, flashy bolo and ropes of silver in Santa Fe.