A SEASON FOR ADORNMENT

Amid the winter doldrums, three jewelry designers create dazzling pieces to brighten your look and spirits

Amid the winter doldrums, three jewelry designers create dazzling pieces to brighten your look and spirits.

CYNTHIA JONES

Three golden sunflowers set with center diamonds bloom on a handmade necklace pendant by Santa Fe artisan Cynthia Jones. The necklace is among a handful of pieces Jones crafted it to raise awareness about a cause close to home. Her daughter was diagnosed as a child with sunflower syndrome, a rare form of photosensitive epilepsy in which sunlight triggers seizures. Although her daughter has since improved, the collection endures as part of Jones’s effort to bring the beautifully brilliant into the everyday. A Santa Fean for more than 20 years, Jones operates a store/ studio behind the Crash Murder Business coffee shop — a location that’s perfectly discoverable yet off the beaten path. Her desk in the shop’s corner is proof that the jewelry is handmade here. It’s scattered with works in progress, such as the delicate petals of a necklace taking shape, with needle-nose pliers nearby. Displays of earrings, pendants, cuffs, and rings — “not trendy but . . . on trend,” she says — reflect her Southwest aesthetic.

Her matching sunflower pieces are an exception among her creations. “I don’t want you to make sets. I want you to have a collection,” she says. She diligently watches what customers gravitate toward and what’s selling and then uses those pieces as jumping-off points for future collections. “It’s not starting from scratch. It’s building on what I’ve already created,” she says. Her work ranges from delicate pendants — the Lucky Horseshoe necklace and the Hometown necklace (shaped like New Mexico, with a diamond set in Santa Fe’s geographic location) are favorites — to bolder statement pieces, like the large Dia earrings with a dot of turquoise on the hoop from her summer 2025 Jupiter Collection. The latter caught the eye of Grammy Award– winning musician Kacey Musgraves when she visited the shop last summer.

Jones is known for mixed-metal pieces; she works with 14K gold vermeil (gold plated over silver) and sterling silver in either polished or oxidized (black patina) forms. She also works with natural stones. Her pieces are fine but affordable and meant to be worn every day. She solders her collections from the feelings, landscapes, and starscapes of her New Mexico home. Previously, she’s taken cues from the Southwest’s spirit of adventure (Ranch), organic shapes and the magic of the natural world (Alchemy), and the energy of the cosmos (Saturn and Jupiter). Launched this fall, her latest collection, Desert Rose, features iterations of a rose design. Jones recalls her grandmother’s costume jewelry as an early inspiration. The elder wore layers of jewelry from multiple sources, tying them together in a cohesive look that made her feel unique and beautiful. She inspired Jones in another way too: She handed her an article about jeweler Dina Varano, who was seeking an apprentice. Jones, who graduated from Southern Connecticut State University with a metalsmithing degree, apprenticed with the Connecticut designer for three years, an experience that helped her hone her skills outside of the classroom.

Jones started her college art career in painting but pivoted after a professor told her she had the ability but not the desire for the medium. Sculpture fascinated her, but she struggled to see its function. Jewelry filled her creative cup while having real-world application. She relished the interactions it created with customers. “It’s all about making women feel good about themselves,” she says.

She and her now husband, photographer/ videographer Bill Stengel, moved to Santa Fe two decades ago from Connecticut, hoping their creative pursuits would root in what they saw as an open-minded artist town. They did.

Jones has grown her business largely, she says, through community and connection, expanding slowly over the years from her home to her current storefront. Her coveted pieces have led her to markets and trunk shows across the country and a level of success built by 20 years of hard work. Although she prefers the meet-the-maker interactions her space provides — she’s discontinued many of her former wholesale accounts, including with the Sundance catalog — her work is also available at high-traffic locales like the Albuquerque International Sunport. Locals often become repeat shoppers, and she enjoys spotting people wearing her jewelry in line at Whole Foods and around town.

Whether she meets them in person or not, her customers are always front of mind. She says, “I want women to treasure their jewelry and feel treasured.”

NEEKO GARCIA

Sterling silver branches descend from a center post with blooming 18K yellow gold flowers set with natural diamonds and dangling strawberries carved from red Mediterranean coral. The Sweetness of a Moment earrings earned Albuquerque jewelry designer Neeko Garcia (Diné/Hispanic) a blue ribbon in the earring category at the 2025 Santa Fe Indian Market, but the earrings’ significance extends beyond a blue ribbon: They capture the essence of a sunset she witnessed during a visit to her family in North Dakota. The yellow natural diamonds reflect the sun’s golden hues, and the fruit recalls her nephew’s strawberry patch in alpenglow.

Her hand-fabricated hummingbirds, butterflies, flowers, and other elements from the natural world have earned fans and judges’ honors at the likes of the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market, the Autry Museum’s American Indian Arts Festival, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture’s Native Treasures Art Market, the Native Art Market at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and Santa Fe Indian Market. Beyond these recognitions, works reflect personal moments from her life and strike at universal experiences of loss, remembrance, and joy. They tell her story in ways words can’t express, she says.

Although she hails from a line of silversmiths, Garcia didn’t pick up the art form until she was in her 20s. “My grandma wanted her children to take it on, but she told us she was too old to teach us. She said, ‘If it’s meant for you, you will find your way.’” Garcia found her way first by beading jewelry as a hobby. On weekends, she’d road-trip to the reservation from her Los Angeles home, where she worked in film post-production, to sell her creations at Native markets. In 2013 the instructor in a silversmithing workshop her sister had gifted her identified her heritage and encouraged her to explore with tools and books beyond the class’s regular curriculum. She keeps a Zia cuff from that workshop in her studio as a reminder of her journey.

The chance at a jewelry apprenticeship prompted her to quit her day job and chase what had become a more fulfilling pursuit, even if doing so involved a drastic pay cut. Using knowledge from that experience, she launched her first jewelry collection on social media in fall 2015.

Her best friend’s death prompted her to leave Los Angeles and move to Shiprock to care for her elderly grandmother. Garcia grew up in Laredo, Texas, so moving to the reservation for the first time enmeshed her in her Native culture in a way she hadn’t previously experienced. When her father’s sudden death sent her reeling, she sought solitude rather than the cushioning cacophony of family.

Moving to the Duke City in 2018 provided that atmosphere. “This is the place where things shifted,” she says of her home and studio. “I was able to heal.” Later, during the pandemic, she would sit outside in her garden, reflecting on her experiences and drawing inspiration from her surroundings. However, she hesitated to lean into the contemporary works she began envisioning, which differed from the silverwork of her heritage. “I was torn between who I am and the box I was in,” she recalls. A phone call with a friend encouraged her to pursue her vision. “He asked, ‘What do you have to lose?’”

After saving for a photo shoot, which she and friends modeled in, she launched a botanical collection via social media in October 2020. She’s since gained both popular and critical acclaim for her organic creations made from silver sheet and stone. Her delicate forms are hyper-realistic; the texture and gentle folds of her metal sunflower petals look just like they do in real life. Her lapidary work, with roses and other forms in coral and turquoise, is similarly detailed.

Each piece of jewelry is not only an artistic choice but also one that “holds memories or comfort in times of need.” Her sunflowers represent her grandma Irene. “Each time I see sunflowers, I can see her sunflower decor and smell her kitchen and her perfume,” she says. Stars represent her father, who was a lifelong Dallas Cowboys fan and someone who frequently gazed at the cosmos. She dedicates hummingbirds to her best friend, James, and other loved ones she’s lost. Strawberries, another frequent motif in her work, represent Garcia and serve as a reminder “to enjoy the sweetness of life.” She says the symbols resonate with customers, who find them visually beautiful and create their own connections to them.

Garcia says her March–April artistic residency at the Institute of American Indian Arts marked the beginning of another phase for her body of work. “Connecting with the students brought me back to where I started. I never saw myself giving advice. But their eagerness to learn brought me back,” she says. The experience is pushing her into a new chapter of creativity, in which she plans to combine her aesthetic and the minimalism of her early work. “The pieces will still honor those I’ve lost and myself, but there will be a juxtaposition of what I used to do and what I do now,” she says.

DAVID GRIEGO

An undulating ribbon of blue opal snakes through banks of fire opal in creations from the River of Love® Collection. Jeweler David Griego found inspiration in the sinuous path of local rivers for the designs, which have become his signature since he launched the collection 30 years ago. Fifty years into a storied career, he still makes jewelry by hand, but often one of the eight jewelers in his employ brings his sketches to life.

A wall of numbered wax molds downstairs from Santa Fe Goldworks, Griego’s Plaza storefront, reflects the collections’ many iterations — pendants, earrings, and, classically, No. 253, a ring set with a center diamond — which emerge whenever inspiration strikes. Here too are molds for other designs, such as Zia pendants; and halo rings, where turquoise surrounds a center diamond. They’re reflections of the trajectory of Griego’s career, which began in 1972 and has since seen him win numerous awards and — as I observed when I visited his shop in early September — has led people to travel from the likes of Dayton, Ohio, just to purchase one of his rings.

Griego grew up on the east side of Santa Fe, the son of a candy salesman father and a cafeteria worker mother who scraped together the funds to put their seven children through private parochial school because they so valued education.

Even as a young child, he enjoyed creating with his hands. “Growing up poor, you had to make things you couldn’t afford or you couldn’t have, like a bike or a skateboard,” he remembers. Around age 14 and driven by curiosity, he began collecting lead from a construction site near his home, melting the metal, and forming it into jewelry. “I just wanted to try new things,” he says.

He fought in the Vietnam War, and when he returned he worked as a draftsman with the city of Santa Fe and PNM. On the side, he studied jewelry informally with Manuel Villalobos and formally at the Albuquerque School of Jewelers Arts. He made his first piece of fine jewelry at his kitchen table in his early 20s. Friends supported his efforts, including one who helped him repurpose a vacuum cleaner motor for a dewaxing autoclave for lost-wax castings.

His first studio was at a home he built along Agua Fria Street. There, an infusion of cash from his parents helped him roof the workshop and keep working. “When people believe in you, like my parents did, that gives you fuel,” he says. Santa Fe Goldworks has been in its current Plaza storefront for more than a dozen years. It has street-level, basement, and third-story spaces for sales and operations.

In the late summer, Griego expanded into a new venture, Rare Finds, where he resells estate sale finds that deserve a second life. His own favorite piece of jewelry was inspired by an estate sale purchase. It is an inlay ring with various shades of blue-green turquoise — a look that usually develops only when turquoise is worn, absorbing body oils, soaps, and lotions over time. Jewelry, he says with his design, is even more beautiful when lived in.

Even amid the lean economic times he's experienced over his long career, when people place more emphasis on groceries and utility bills than fine jewelry purchases, he says his business survives because of the relationships he’s built with his family, customers, and vendors. “I can say I’ve won all these awards, but I’d rather talk about relationships,” he says. He prides himself on always paying his vendors and buying only what he can afford. “I can’t not pay my vendors and walk through trade shows with my head held high.”

Santa Fe Goldworks has become a family business, where his sons and grandson have joined him. Second generations from his jewelers are joining the business too — as happened with Rafael Hernandez, whom he considers family. “We’ve licked a lot of rocks together!” he says, referring to the practice of wetting a piece of turquoise to reveal the matrix it will have when polished. “During COVID, we brought spray bottles though.”

The turquoise, Australian opal, and Mediterranean coral they buy quickly find their way into alluring jewelry. “Designs just come to my mind,” he says of the creative practice he’s done every day for decades. The local scenery also inspires his creations. “I like to make things that look organic.” He still sketches by hand, though these days his team is increasingly translating the sketches into CAD drawings. His original designs have carried his intention since he started: to create pieces that are part of people’s lives and become family heirlooms.

“It’s always challenging,” he says. “Every day is a new jewelry design problem to solve. People bring in diamonds or gold and ask us to create something. It’s always a challenge to design the right thing for them.”