Tufa cast buckle by renowned Navajo silversmith Edison Cummings. The 2 5/8” x 1 5/8” silver buckle has a 14k gold star and side band.
Tufa casting is a technique of pouring molten silver into a tufa stone mold and letting it harden into a given form. The mold is only used once; therefore each item is an original piece.
Edison Cummings, born 1962 in White Cone, Arizona, has been producing jewelry since 1993. He attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Arizona State University. He has won numerous awards at the Santa Fe Indian Market and the Heard Museum shows.
This Buckle is made to fit a 1 1/4” belt.
About the artist
Edison Cummings
Edison Cummings, born 1962 in White Cone, Arizona, has been producing jewelry since the early 1990’s. He is particularly well-known for his contemporary work in gold, silver fabricated set stone jewelry typified by excellent craftsmanship and design. Besides jewelry and painting, Edison Cummings has also ingeniously crafted silver in other incredible forms including flatware, teapots, coffee pots, purses, and boxes. In fact, Edison’s diversity of finished pieces is greater than almost any other contemporary American Indian jeweler. One might not even realize that it is all from the same artist.
Edison was inspired by Navajo painter Jim Abeita at a very young age He attended Toyei Boarding School, graduated Holbrook High School in Arizona in 1981 and then moved to Santa Fe to study at the lnstitute of American Indian Arts. Initially, he studied painting, but Cummings began to shift his interests toward three-dimensional art, particularly sculpture, and he also took jewelry classes. By the time he studied metalsmithing, Edison was well-equipped to apply his painterly techniques towards jewelry making. Edison’s original jewelry designs combine materials and textures much like a painter would blend colors to compose a picture.
"I've been an artist all my life. My interest in learning to paint began at a very young age. As a child, my mother bought me sketchpads and watercolors to paint, and in the eighth grade, my art class took a trip to visit the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. It was then that I decided I was going to be an artist. I told myself I would be back in four years." Four years later, Cummings did return to study two-dimensional art but graduated from IAIA with a three-dimensional art degree. Edison left New Mexico to attend Arizona State University to pursue an art education degree. While there, his curriculum required him to take metal stretching courses, which he found to be very intriguing.
In the summer of 1990, he acquired hands-on experience by working at the White Hogan in Scottsdale, Arizona. He continued working there for five years, incorporating his artistic ideas into jewelry making and creating jewelry and flatware. Edison is known for his one of kind contemporary silver and gold fabricated set stone jewelry and his elegant teapots, his signature piece.
In addition to his penchant for raised metal forms, since 2005 he has experimented with patterns in wood and stone: “Although these appear to be Loloma inspired, Cummings’ training first as a silversmith led him to embellish the stone and woodwork with inset bezel-set stones. This feature distinguishes his work from that of other jewelers,” says Diana Pardue in Contemporary Southwestern Jewelry.
