Glyph Bracelet, Design No. 152

A hinged bracelet of broad silver panels, each worked in repoussé and chasing with an angular, glyph-like device raised against a darkened ground. The panels read as a sequence of separate signs rather than as a continuous pattern, and the darkening between the raised forms is what makes each device legible at arm's length. At 142 grams the bracelet has real substance; this is not a light stamped band.

The mark reads LOS CASTILLO TAXCO STERLING MEXICO 152, giving the standard and the design number together. Design 152 is a low number and belongs to the workshop's early production. Los Castillo was founded in Taxco in 1939 by the Castillo brothers with Salvador Terán, and a flattened, repeatable glyph vocabulary of this kind is characteristic of the taller's first decade, when pre-Columbian sign systems were being adapted as ornament rather than quoted archaeologically.

The design is by Margot van Voorhies Carr, who worked as a designer inside Los Castillo before opening her own atelier in 1948. Work she designed at the taller was issued under the collective workshop name, which is why the mark on this bracelet names Los Castillo alone.