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A beautiful and precious McKee Platero Navajo silver and turquoise “Naja” pendant, 2024

Fresh from the extraordinarily skilled hands and brilliant artistic mind of the great master

a couple mere weeks ago comes this exquisite, sweet Navajo silver and turquoise Naja pendant.

How great is great? How high is up? McKee Platero’s pieces always make you ask questions like these. We have been buying and selling McKEE Platero’s (b.1957) extraordinary Navajo silverwork for around 40 years now and we can

say without qualification that, in our estimation he is undoubtedly one of the very finest Navajo silversmiths of his

era, and of all time, in the exalted company of Kenneth Begay, Fred Peshlakai and Slender-Maker-of-Silver.

His overall level of creative design originality and aesthetic beauty, perfection of technical execution and finish on every piece is simply unparalleled as can be seen quite clearly on this beautiful, small Naja pendant. The pendant is

most finely formed of tufa-cast ingot silver, a painstaking traditional Navajo silversmithing method where red-hot molten silver from melted coins or silver casting grain is cast into a hand-carved Volcanic Tufa mold. Platero makes

this painstaking process look effortless here with a beautifully-shaped, carinated Naja form with a lovely figurative five-pointed star in the center. Some elegant spare stamp work designs grace and ornament the silver body of the Naja and as the perfect and proverbial cherry on the sundae, a beautiful teardrop-shaped high-grade Kingman, Arizona Spiderweb turquoise stone is beautifully set into the top of the piece.

The Naja pendant measures 2 3/4" in height including the baile and is a touch over 1 3/4" in width at its widest point.

The silver body of the Naja is 1/8" in thickness. The Naja weighs a substantial 33 grams or 1 1/8 ounces and it sits quite comfortably on the body. The condition is new and unworn, as if it had just come off the Silversmith’s bench which, in point of fact, it just did.

There are a few very small original tooling marks visible on the silver which McKee Platero occasionally leaves intentionally on his pieces which simply reinforces the completely handmade nature of the pendant. The pendant is presently strung on a fine black silk jewelry cord, but it could just as easily be hung on a suede or smooth leather thong, a silver chain or worn on a strand of “Navajo Pearls” style silver beads. The pendant is most beautifully signed on the back as follows in McKee’s elegant cursive writing: “McKee A. Platero” with his three-dot insignia which was originally inspired by the three stars in the “belt” of the constellation Orion in the night sky.

That’s basically all there is to say here, this is an iconic and elegant piece from an iconic and elegant artist.

It is quite literally the jewelry manifestation of the Navajo ideal state of human existence which is to “Walk in Beauty” which you most certainly will while wearing it or otherwise admiring it.

SOLD