Feathers Bracelet

That a bracelet in this idiom now sits in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (M.2013.6.6) says a great deal about how seriously Hector Aguilar's silver came to be taken as design rather than mere ornament. The Feathers model takes a natural form and resolves it into repeating silver units worn around the wrist, the kind of disciplined, sculptural reading of a motif that defined Aguilar's output after he set up on his own in Taxco.

The piece is worked in sterling silver and set with obsidian, the volcanic black stone native to central Mexico. Here the dark stone anchors the bright silver feather forms.

Aguilar built his reputation at the Taller Borda, the workshop he ran in Taxco, where heavy-gauge silver and clean construction became a house signature. A surviving example of the Feathers design in a major museum collection is the kind of piece that rarely surfaces on the open market, and its presence in a public holding fixes it as part of the documented record of his work.