Creating a tribute: Award-winning jewelry artist Franklin Carrillo transforms traditional designs into contemporary forms

Nov. 19—Franklin Carrillo inlays delicate stones of turquoise, coral and flaming red rosarita into link bracelets honoring the Southwestern cultural landscape.

The Laguna Pueblo jeweler is equal parts Renaissance Man and soft-spoken artist, with a large dose of humility behind his brown eyes.

This winner of multiple awards will be showing his work at the Winter Indian Market at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center from Saturday, Nov. 25, through Sunday, Nov. 26.

Roughly 150 of the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts' juried artists will be selling pottery, jewelry, paintings, carvings, weavings and more throughout the weekend.

Carrillo spent the first six years of his life at Laguna before his family moved to the Navajo Reservation. There he was surrounded by jewelers.

"My friend did inlay, so I wanted to," he said.

Specializing in link and cuff bracelets, Carrillo has created tributes to such sacred Native sites as Chaco Canyon, Canyon de Chelly and Mesa Verde. All feature carefully-placed stones in silver or gold, often mimicking the architecture of these places of mystery and beauty.

"It's to honor them," Carrillo said from his Albuquerque home.

His friend Duane Maktima, a respected jewelry artist himself, taught him how to inlay stones.

It's "the colors, the way you could put it together with red and blue and turquoise," Carrillo said. "And you can vary the sizes. You can do a lot with a little bit of stone and color."}

A fire engine red rosarita link bracelet features small slices of stone carefully divided into various geometric shapes and sizes by silver.

Rosarita is a unique by-product of the 1960s and 1970s gold refining processes. Miners smelted Alaskan beach sand for its gold content, and the slag by-product was rosarita, essentially a gold-infused glass.

Another cuff bracelet features the sculpted vertical slabs stone designs made famous by Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma in a tribute of ironwood, turquoise, rosarita, ivory and coral.

Carrillo uses fabrication techniques that include hollow forms, stamping, overlay, reticulation of silver and gold, as well as inlay.

He sketches out his new designs first, then they flow from his fingers like magic.

"I'll figure out a starting point," he said. "And then I figure out a color combination. That's not planned out."

He can custom fit his bracelets by adding or subtracting a link.

Another link bracelet features pueblo pottery designs from across New Mexico. He transforms traditional designs into contemporary forms.

Carrillo held up a brown fossilized walrus tusk from Alaska he sometimes incorporates into his work.

"I have pieces that are part of sled rails," he said. "People were riding with their dogs."

As a young man, Carrillo left the University of New Mexico four classes short of graduation. He had juried into the Santa Fe Indian Market and learned he could make money. He says he fell in love with jewelry making when he started creating pieces he really liked.

Today, he's taking classes at Central New Mexico Community College in industrial wiring and solar power installation.

"Electricity is very important," this son of an electrician said. "It's a powerful force. I'm interested in the solar program, to help mitigate climate change."

Carrillo's work has been shown in juried art shows at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian Winter Market in New York, the Natural History Museum in Salt Lake City's Indian Market, Arizona's Prescott Market and at the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market in Phoenix.

His pieces are in the permanent collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the California Academy of Sciences, the Arizona State Museum in Tucson and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe.