Frank Yellowhorse was a Navajo artist, and the Yellowhorse name is one of the better known in Arizona Native American jewelry.
He was born in Holbrook in 1933 and, with his brother, built the family trading post at Lupton on the Arizona and New Mexico line, right on Interstate 40 where old Route 66 ran. It started as a roadside stand selling rugs and petrified wood to people driving through, and grew into a landmark that generations of travellers stopped at. He worked at the bench alongside running it, and taught the next generation of Yellowhorse silversmiths, so the name now covers a family tradition as much as one man.
His own work is bold. Yellowhorse is associated with strong geometric inlay: blocks and bands of colour cut and set into sterling silver in confident, graphic arrangements rather than fine pictorial detail. It is jewelry meant to be seen across a room, and it reads as Southwestern immediately.
This collection holds his bracelets and his animal pendants, including bear and buffalo forms in sterling silver, several of them large. The buffalo and the bear are recurring Southwestern figures, and he worked them at a scale that suits a heavier chain.
Frank Yellowhorse died in 2020, so this work cannot be reordered, and pieces carrying his name are increasingly collected. What is on this page is what we have. If you want to see it against other Navajo silverwork we carry, look at Thomas Singer for overlay, or Herbert Begaye for gold-on-silver, or browse all necklaces and bracelets. Our Old Town Scottsdale showroom has been open since 1979 and the pieces are in the case.