Inside the Studio

By Diane Daly

Artist: Mimi Haggerty
Medium: Silversmithing, Jewelry Sculpture
Studio Location: Private Residence, central Tucson
Store Location: Piney Hollow on 4th Avenue

urrounded by family as always, Mimi Haggerty is setting out a pan of buttered banana bread and mentioning how she got into making jewelry as if it could have happened to anyone.

You see, when it is 1971 and California’s artichoke fields are turning into tract houses, you and your husband naturally exchange the home you built there for cash and a school bus. That bus carries the two of you and your five school-age children on a road trip through Mexico “until the money runs out.” On that 9-month voyage your brood bumps along from Mexico’s northern border to its southern one, then back up again, and collects six jars of undersized opals from a mine in Magdalena along the way. Then, when the money’s exhausted, you make it an hour north of the border to Tucson’s Randolph Park Craft Fair and befriend a group of jewelry artisans. The jewelers you meet help you learn to make your jars of opal-mine cast-offs into rings, necklaces, and then a wholesale business that grows into Piney Hollow, the grooviest bead-and-jewelry business in Downtown Tucson, now celebrating its 35th year.

Naturally, right? Well of course not for most of us, even in the 1970’s. It worked that way for Mimi and her clan, however, much the way her silver creations work: due to a mixture of inherent shine, careful work, a network of support, and kismet.

Take one of the many silver belt buckles Mimi has created as an example. In this one, she cut out wave shapes and delicately overlaid them onto one another along with a glimmering spiral side view of a wave crest, but when that was all completed it still needed a centerpiece to fit in an upside-down dome-shaped setting. Fitting, then, that a dome-shaped shell should wash up on some distant shore and find its way through a friend into Mimi’s hands. It fit perfectly, and the piece that was not conceived as a whole became a moody and bubbling orange and green seaside sunset.

“That’s what I have fun doing, putting things together,” Mimi says. Her hair is bone-white, her eyes are black like the black onyx she adds to plain settings to give them drama and resolution. She is not a mousy woman, but when the family sits around the kitchen table and recounts the origins of Piney Hollow, she will always emphasize the good fortune that played a role in her becoming a gifted silversmith more than she will emphasize her talent. In part this is because cooperation of family and friends allowed her to continue what for her is natural, but would have been impossible without their support.

Everyone in the family made jewelry when the business started; it seems every Haggerty child for two generations has had a Piney Hollow business card. Together with a dozen other craftspeople who joined them early on, they built up the business in the 70’s and 80’s by capitalizing first on the popularity of turquoise, then on jasper when turquoise waned. Mimi’s husband Mike recounts that “It reached a point where we had so many orders that one of us would have to stop making jewelry and take over control of the finances.” A keen businessman with a background in both advertising and government, Mike made what he calls the “agonizing decision” to become the business manager.

His decision allowed Mimi’s natural talents as an artist to blossom. “Mimi was always a seamstress and an embroiderer and an artist. She taught us how to make art,” says Shannon, Mimi’s daughter and current business manager of Piney Hollow. Today Mimi is in her seventies, and her creations still flash irresistibly at 4th Avenue passersby and the pool of clients who flock toward her pieces when the mood strikes to adorn. They pull strings of violet sujelite and Bali beads across their throats, warble over butterfly pins with amber torsos and tiger eye wings, and marvel at the way she sets off blown glass with a peridot bullet. One of her pieces, a layered silver phoenix, is said to have cured cancer.

Mimi Haggerty’s studio is a closet accessed from their home’s side walkway and bathed in golden light from a bamboo curtain hung over its single window. It’s so crowded with objects that appear chaotic from afar, but look closer and each piece has its place. Beads in their plastic drawers on the fourth shelf, tools in cigar boxes on the sixth, silk thread in labeled cookie tins on the eighth. Pieces disassembled are diffused into new pieces, their stories spreading like seeds, the finished products glowing with legacy.