Joe Cajero was born in 1970 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and raised in Jemez Pueblo. He is a descendant of a long line of Pueblo artists, including his father, a painter, and his mother, a potter. As a young man, Cajero often accompanied his mother to Indian art shows throughout the Southwest.

David John was born in 1963 and raised just east of the Hopi Mesas at Keams Canyon, Arizona. As a young boy, he was close to his grandfather, a Navajo Medicine Man revered by the Navajo people. His grandfather shared stories of the Navajo Creation with David and trained him to help gather materials and perform ceremonies.

Oreland Joe is among the finest sculptural artists in the world. He was born in 1958  in Shiprock, New Mexico. Of Diné (Navajo) and Ute descent, he was raised in the Four Corners area, spending his youth on both the Navajo and Ute reservations. He wanted to be an artist from a young age and never let go of that dream.

Charlie Pratt was of Cheyenne-Arapaho and French descent and grew up surrounded by art and artists. As a child, he watched his grandfather, a jack-of-all-trades, make everything from jewelry to houses, and he learned early how to shape people and animals from river clay between El Reno and Concho, Oklahoma.

Navajo sculptor Alvin Marshall has been carving works out of stone for about 40 years. When we opened our current location in 1983, he and Orland Joe often traveled the show circuit together, selling their works.

The two of them traveled to Europe and studied in Italy, learning to work with marble and visiting the great museums where they studied the works of the classic Italian sculptors.

One of the best friends I have made in the art business is George Walbye, a sculptor from Loveland, Colorado.

For the past several years, we have been featuring the Navajo Folk Art of Delbert Buck.

For more than 20 years, Cowboys & Indians magazine has been one of the most popular publications for people who love and appreciate the Western and Native cultures. The magazine is so popular that people buy and sell past issues online.

For several years, Peter quit painting and focused on canvas art, sewing animal figures out of canvas and decorating them with feathers, beads and acrylic paints.

I kept asking him when he was going to start painting again and last year he broke out the easel and reached into his bag of creativity.

In 1973, I was driving our company vehicle, a Dodge Maxi-Van, on a trip through Colorado to sell jewelry and rugs to some of the stores in the Estes Park and Denver areas.

We were doing business out of the front of my Dad’s Pepsi plant in Durango. At the time, you could never have called us an “upscale” establishment, but we had great rugs and jewelry and people seemed to find us.