Original Loloma Stone Lithograph “Mudheads” [SOLD]

Charles Loloma is most famous for his imaginative jeweler but he also was a painter, a sculptor, a potter, a basket maker, a designer of houses and a stained glass artist.  He then became a lithographer in 1980. 

Loloma was born in the village of Hotevilla on the Hopi Reservation in 1920.  His father was a weaver and his mother a basket maker.  As a child, he began painting and by the time he graduated from High School, he had already illustrated a book for Edward Kennard.  Loloma’s jewelry made him a famous and wealthy man but it did not quench his thirst for finding another manner of expressing his artistic talents. 

Loloma created this image of three Mudheads through the medium of stone lithography, a medium by which the art is executed by drawing an image on a granite-like stone that is perfectly smooth and perfectly flat.  The image is then treated with solutions that permit ink to be absorbed in desired sections and repelled in non-image sections.  It is a laborious process and involves using a separate stone for each color in the image.  Each color is then printed singly and the end result is the finished product.

This lithograph was begun on October 9, 1980 and completed on December 31, 1980.  It was printed at Southwest Graphics Workshop of Scottsdale, Arizona.  It was printed on buff Arches paper in six colors.  There were 100 copies printed in the numbered edition.  There were also 3 Studio Impressions.  This is number 1 of the Studio Impressions.  It is signed in lower right and numbered in lower left.  Official documentation is included with the lithograph.

The image is of three Koyemsi or Mudhead Katsinas, spiritual beings of the Hopi.  Although the Koyemsi are childlike, or witless in their behavior, they are regarded as the “sages of the ancients, oracles who speak with the voices of idiots mixing wisdom and nonsense in every utterance.  Loloma commented that to the white man, the Kachina is a doll, but to the Hopi, it is a spirit that comes in a physical form, to alert that there is more to life than everyday routine, to teach that there is beauty in everything. The Mudheads are jokers, who teach the Hopi that it is good to laugh at life. 

Condition: original condition and mounted such that the full paper is visible.

Provenance: from a gentleman from Colorado