Gail Bird and Yazzie Johnson: Winter 2025

This winter, The Owings Gallery presents a new body of jewelry by Gail Bird and Yazzie Johnson, whose partnership stands among the most enduring and influential in contemporary Indigenous jewelry. Their collaborative practice, established over decades of shared inquiry, continues to expand the possibilities of adornment as both artistic expression and cultural discourse.

Bird and Johnson approach jewelry as a site of intellectual rigor as well as visual power. Drawing from Indigenous knowledge systems, modernist design principles, and a sustained engagement with materials, their work resists categorization. Stone, metal, and surface are treated not simply as decorative elements, but as carriers of history, place, and lived experience. Each piece is resolved through careful balance, precision, and an acute awareness of scale and wearability.

This new collection reflects their ongoing commitment to experimentation and refinement. While grounded in Indigenous perspectives, the work speaks within a global contemporary context, addressing questions of authorship, collaboration, and continuity. The jewelry presented here affirms Bird and Johnson’s position as artists whose contributions have reshaped the field, offering work that is at once materially sophisticated, conceptually layered, and deeply resonant.