San Ildefonso artist Awa Tsireh (Alfonso Roybal) is best known as an early master of Pueblo painting; but in his lifetime he also gained renown as a silversmith.
Awa Tsireh (pronounced Ah-wah Sid-ee or See-day) was born in 1898 to Juan Estevan and Alfonsita Martinez Roybal; he was the eldest of six children. He drew sketches of dances and animals even before attending San Ildefonso Day School where the teacher provided drawing supplies. He did not continue his education after leaving the day school, and his drawing and painting skills were mostly self-taught; though he also learned from watching his uncle Crescencio Martinez who used watercolors to paint dancers on paper in the mid-1910s for Edgar Lee Hewitt. As a young man Awa Tsireh (Cat-tail Bird) painted the decorations on the pottery his mother made.
In the summer of 1917 Santa Fe poet Alice Corbin Henderson was introduced to Awa Tsireh’s paintings and she became his first patron and promoter. Awa Tsireh’s fame grew nationally in the 1920s prompting a successful one-man show in Chicago; he also painted most of the illustrations for the book Tewa Firelight Tales by Ahlee James published in 1927. In 1931 Awa Tsireh joined with other San Ildefonso artists, including Maria Martinez, Tonita Roybal and Abel Sanchez (Oqwa Pi), to exhibit their works at the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts in New York City.
Awa Tsireh’s paintings of pueblo dancers and mythology, including black-and-white striped clowns (or kossa) and animals like skunks, owls, and turkeys were meticulously and precisely drawn in both realistic and modernistic styles. Animal forms such as skunks, roadrunners, and owls were also favored subjects of his silverwork.
It is not known when or from whom Awa Tsireh learned silversmithing but by 1931 he was described in a newspaper article as a painter and, “also a mural painter, a silversmith and a dancer.”
John Adair reported in his 1944 book The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths that Awa Tsireh was only one of three men in San Ildefonso who worked silver, and that he made pieces in his studio for the tourists who visited the pueblo. However, it was at Garden of the Gods Trading Post in Colorado Springs where the majority of his metalwork was made.
Garden of the Gods Trading Post was built in 1929 by Charles E. Strausenback, and is still in operation in the same building on the southern boundary of the Garden of the Gods park in Colorado Springs.
Awa Tsireh’s association with Garden of the Gods Trading Post had begun by 1930 and continued for at least two decades. His sister Santana Martinez recalled that “during the summer during the thirties and forties he used to go to a shop in Colorado Springs and do his paintings and silverwork there” (Seymour, When the Rainbow Touches Down). He was the most prominent of the many silversmiths who worked at the trading post over the decades; which included Hosteen Goodluck, William Goodluck and David Taliman.
Awa Tsireh’s metalwork did not go without notice, as in 1938, when the Hutchinson, Kansas News-Herald, while reporting on the impending nuptials of a local couple, exclaimed:
Spell it Awa Tsireh—pronounce it A-Wa Si-dy! Whoever he is, he’s the Indian silversmith responsible for that symbolical silver plate which Elizabeth and Joe, to wed today, will give choice place in their household. Of about luncheon size, the plate center is beaten and etched with a god to watch over them, and filled in about and on the rim with emblems of wisdom, constancy, love and happiness. There is no other plate like it and there won’t be for the famous “Awa Sidy” never duplicates. Of New Mexico originally, he’s now collaborating with Charles E. Strausenback in a museum at the Garden of the Gods. The gorgeous silver bracelets which Elizabeth often wears are his work.
He split his efforts between painting and silversmithing during these years and in 1939 was commissioned to paint a mural on the front of the newly erected building to house Maisel’s Indian Trading Post in downtown Albuquerque. The trading post is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and Awa Tsireh’s mural of a corn dance is still on view on the building’s facade.
When it came to metalworking, Awa Tsireh worked in many mediums, not only in silver but also copper, nickel silver and aluminum. What has been written about Awa Tsireh’s paintings is also true of his metalwork, he was precise and meticulous and a master artist. His work shows magnificently designed and stamped elements and elegant repoussé work. He helped transform the metalwork made at Garden of the Gods from typical tourist style jewelry—with figural stamps of thunderbirds, arrows and whirling logs popular at the time— into pieces of art, most evident in the trays and pins that he produced.
Awa Tsireh made a variety of forms during his silversmithing career including bracelets, pins, rings, trays, bowls and concho belts. His work is signed AWA TSIREH and most often with one of the Garden of the Gods shop marks such as SOLID SILVER. Pieces that are only signed with his name, which are rare, were likely made at his studio in San Ildefonso. Items bearing shop marks from the Garden of the Gods Trading Post, but lacking the hallmark for Awa Tsireh, are not of the same quality of work as pieces signed with his name. Consequently, only those pieces bearing his hallmark AWA TSIREH can confidently be credited as his work.
His production of paintings and silverwork slowed after World War II, but Awa Tsireh continued to work. In 1954 he was awarded the French government’s Ordre des Palmes Académiques for “distinguished contributions to education or culture” along with eleven other Indian artists including Ambrose Roanhorse, Maria Martinez, Fred Kabotie, Alan Houser and Pablita Velarde.
Though he traveled fairly often, especially in summer, he always made the village of San Ildefonso his main residence. Awa Tsireh died tragically from exposure on the outskirts of San Ildefonso on March 29, 1955. He was memorialized a few months later by the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe with an exhibit of forty-three examples of his paintings.
The foregoing was derived from our book Reassessing Hallmarks of Native Southwest Jewelry: Artists, Traders, Guilds, and the Government, and originally published on our Goodreads.com blog June 30, 2016.