Contemporary Jewellers is an important read for anyone interested in the state of art jewelry today. The beauty and interest in this book comes when distinguished makers address some of the most potent and salient questions in contemporary jewelry. The book is comprised of a robust introduction, 25 short interviews with jewelry artists, several pages of luscious color plates, and a short conclusion. This structure is designed to be helpful for students and those getting started in the field. The brevity of the interviews often leaves room for misinterpretation, and consequently, some background knowledge of each artist’s work would prove helpful. In short, Contemporary Jewellers is best supplemented by a healthy amount of outside research for images and contextual information, or the text would best serve those at the intermediate stages of their academic career.

Bernabei begins with a historical overview of European jewelry from the Middle Ages to the present day. All too often, the studio art movement is touted as the father of the studio jewelry movement, leaving students with little sense of the origins of the discipline. It is therefore refreshing to read a history of contemporary jewelry that draws parallels to the working practices of jewelers through the centuries, charting how techniques and ideals have changed, and the ways in which jewelry’s past has influenced its present.

Bernabei then makes a point of creating a distinction between two kinds of jewelry on the scene today—jewelry as content and sensitized jewelry. Jewelry as content, according to the author, uses the format of jewelry as a vessel for communicating a wide variety of ideas. These range from social commentary to autobiographical narrative to more insular conversations such as the politics of adornment, the nature of beauty, and the mutability of value. Bernabei defines sensitized jewelry as work in which form is content; jewelry concerned with the relationships of colors, materials, and wearability.  

The interviews that make up the heart of this book are engaging and thought provoking with occasional bursts of humor. The artists speak with a conversational tone, and their (sometimes) polemical viewpoints provide good starting points for classroom dialog. Each interview gives us a tiny glimpse into the inner workings of the artist’s studio practice, focusing on how his or her work is developed and what concepts drive his or her creative thinking. With few exceptions, Bernabei chooses her questions well. Potent and open ended, designed to touch on some of the most fundamental issues in the field, her queries have a way of unearthing something surprising and contentious in even the most conservative and formal jeweler.

Each interview is structured similarly, with a list of questions that prompts the artists to reflect on how they develop their ideas, where they draw their inspiration, their relationship to materials, the importance of function to their work, and advice for jewelry students. Despite the author’s best efforts to provide an encompassing summary of the wide variety of views presented in these 25 interviews, each issue remains deliciously obscure. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Well founded differences of opinion and healthy debate are signs of a robust field with plenty of ground left to cover. Take, for example, the many differing opinions on the subject of the handmade. Bruno Martinazzi finds that direct contact with materials is integral to the development of his work. He suggests that, “with our hands we receive the answers asked by the materials.” (137) Gijs Bakker disagrees. He has sworn off working with materials directly, explaining, “I don’t want the sweat and tears present my jewelry.” (56)

The chosen artists are all strongly committed to the format of jewelry. This allows them to approach the interview questions with a great degree of intensity and insight. It is easy to overlook the big questions that are often taken for granted in a field. For art jewelry, these questions include: What does it mean for something to be wearable? What is function? What is the cultural relevance of jewelry today? When was it that someone first looked at an object and experienced the mystifying need to hold it to their bodies, to pour into that object a meaning simultaneously about and beyond themselves? I suspect that this strangely ethereal power is what drew many of us to jewelry in the first place, but the opportunities to discuss the deep, pervasive, eons-old power of jewelry are disturbingly few. In reading this collection of brief interviews, the attractive force of this mode of expression bleeds through the pages and eddies in the contrasting responses of experienced and innovative artists.

Take, for example, the differing opinions presented on the nature and importance of wearability. Manfred Bischoff adopts a modernist approach, claiming that a “ring must be able to survive without the hand or fingers. You can turn it, and it must function from all viewpoints like a sculpture.” (65) Compare this statement with the fiercely reductive approach of Ruudt Peters, who takes the opposite tack. “When you wear it, then it’s jewelry. When you don’t, it’s an object.” (158) Between these poles, there are a myriad of subtler, more conditional views. Ted Noten posits, “People are so obsessed that you have to wear jewelry, but I always say you don’t have to wear it. That it can have meaning by itself.” (148) Piecing together these views, we arrive at a sort of choppy conversation, allowing us to map out these artists in relation to one another, which in turn helps us understand the nature of the field.

There is a general celebration of disagreement and ambiguity that comes through in these interviews. The result is confident, strong, playful, and deep work. It is free from the self-doubt and identity crisis that so often haunts contemporary jewelry when overburdened with conceptual posturing. While many jewelers openly acknowledge that there are problems in the field, their overall tone is enthusiastic and hopeful. Their passion for their work and dedication to their field is reflected in the emotions displayed when the relationship between jewelry and fine art is mentioned. Reactions ranged from frustration to humor to dismissal. Bernhard Schobinger says it best. “… I don’t feel like a little brother of fine art. I think jewelry art is an independent art and not under the influence of fine art.” (197) Schobinger’s declaration of autonomy is refreshing. All too often, contemporary jewelers seem unwilling to accept their heritage, and academic writers seem bent on finding them a place at the table with painters and sculptors as the awkward stepchild of the studio arts movement rather than using historical context as a foundation for the successful development of the field. The artists interviewed in Contemporary Jewellers are not afraid to make connections between contemporary jewelry and a host of fields outside the conceptual art world including fashion, design, and a larger history of adornment. When asked about the direction of contemporary jewelry, Ruudt Peters jubilantly exclaims, “Anyone can make anything. I love fashion jewelry, I love the jewelry on the street, and I love the jewelry that people make and wear. It’s ok.” (159)

The clarity and commitment of this book’s mission is admirable. It aims to provide primary source documentation of the motivations behind influential European jewelers working today. As such, it will certainly be a boon to educators and practitioners alike. Toward the end of the book, I found myself wishing that one or two interviews had been conducted jointly to turn the focus from a single artist’s practice to the future of the field. Here’s hoping for another book.

Patricia Faber of the Aaron Faber Gallery in New York curated Innovation and Craftsmanship in 2012 to raise the profile of studio artists from Quebec, Canada. The artists, enjoying the success of their combined energy, decided to expand on the original idea by making it into a travelling exhibition called 14 Jewellery Artists of Quebec. It includes Elise Bergeron, Matthieu Cheminée, Laurie Dansereau, Roland Dubuc, Gustavo Estrada, Jean-Pierre Gauvreau, Janis Kerman, Christine Larochelle, Lynn Légaré, Annegret Morf, Pierre-Yves Paquette, Claudio Pino, Antonio Serafino, and Barbara Stutman. This group approached Lisa Albuquerque at L. A. Pai Gallery in Ottawa, Ontario, and she decided to take on the show. It will continue on to Galerie Noel Guyomarc’h in Montreal in the fall.

Susan Cummins: Why did you decide to take on this show? 

Lisa Albuquerque: I initially considered the exhibition out of respect for the three artists I have represented for more than a decade: Matthieu Cheminée, Gustavo Estrada, and Janis Kerman. The collective force of the artists in a new initiative made it a worthwhile project to undertake, and it gave me the opportunity to enjoy the presence of a few of the artists I’d long been aware of but had never worked with. A travelling exhibition can stretch a dealer and can challenge one’s personal proclivities.

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Here in the Jewelry Design | Silversmithing department we design contemporary jewels and small objects. Objects that may or may not be functional, but clearly refer to mankind and his size. That is why we consider “the body” – both as regards jewels and objects – as the red thread running through the program.

In creating jewels and objects (“domestic things”), we always start out from the visual meaning – from the idea. An affinity with material and technique is important, but also subordinate to that idea. Moreover, the Jewelry Design | Silversmithing department offers an academic training. This means that artistic work is always tied to research and theory.

That is why our work is always based on research. We gather sources from outside and from within ourselves. We develop design methods. Ours is an ongoing search for the combination between thinking and doing, research and intuition, content and execution, the imagination and interpretation. This whole process is recorded in sketch books and photographs and on film,… so that other disciplines – whether analogue or digital – can also be involved in the design. And it is out of this process-related work method that strong images will emerge. Powerful images that communicate in an authentic manner with the outside world, the public, people. As a piece of jewelry or an object.

In the first bachelor year the emphasis is on experimentation; visual assignments will confront our students with something unexpected and challenge them to discover and push back their own limits.

In the second year students will zoom in on the course itself. They will explore the specific language of jewels and objects. A language that says something about “value”, “luxury”, “use”, “protection”, “souvenir”, “status”, “tradition”, … Themes that refer to content and meaning.

In the third year students will mostly work independently and will try to determine their own position within the international professional field. By now they will have developed an authentic visual language in their own handwriting.

In the Master’s year the emphasis will be even more on responsibility and the artist’s own initiatives. This time students will formulate their own research questions and determine the context of their work. This Master’s year is only intended for students who wish to pursue the research-related aspect.

We will familiarize students both with the ancient techniques of basic silversmithing and new technologies thanks to collaborations with small studios and large companies. These techniques will especially serve as a starting point from which to explore new paths and discover new territory. Working with metal (silver, copper, aluminum, steel, etc.) is thus encouraged, but not deemed self-evident. Other materials or techniques can be explored if the meaning of the work requires so.

Studying in this department is the contemporary continuation of something that started long ago: the relationship between mankind and things.

Hilde De Decker (Head of Jewelry department)

Hilde De Decker (°1965) is a jewelry artist based in Londerzeel (BE). She began her education studying interior architecture at Sint-Lucas Ghent, and later obtained an MA in jewelry design at the Sint Lucas University College of Art & Design Antwerp. Her first solo exhibition, Eva's Cushion, was presented at Galerie V&V, Vienna, in 1996. Since then, she has exhibited internationally and developed a critical design practice that deals with aspects of value, memory and domesticity. Her initial interest in interior architecture still marks her jewelry and objects, in particular when she carefully orchestrates installations and environments.

Lecturers:

Hilde Van der Heyden (Jewelry design)

Hilde Van der Heyden is an artist who lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.  She is a graduate from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (1982) and the HISK (1985) in Antwerp. 
Her work can be found in Belgian museums, and she regularly exhibited her work since 1982. 
“I find intense pleasure in adorning people as well as my environment, through searching, researching and the making itself , which are imperative for me.
Naturally I focus on jewels but, increasingly more, on objects.  Seemingly trite objects can express moments or events in one’s day-to-day life.  I want to highlight those moments with their underlying stories."

Pia Clauwaert (Jewelry design)

Pia Clauwaert graduated at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and completed her study  at the HISK  Antwerp.  Working in her own studio, she started teaching at Sint Lucas University College of Art & Design Antwerp in 1990. Since 2001 she’s also part of the jewelry research department .
In her work she uses traditional techniques  to explore and realize ideas on making and wearing jewelry. She’s interested in  the ornamental and decorative aspects  of jewelry and asks questions on the power of a jewel in order to his monumentality:  “The life of a jewel starts by wearing it”.

Liesbeth Bussche (researcher)

Liesbet Bussche, researcher at the jewelry department of Sint Lucas University College of Art & Design Antwerp, is a Belgian artist who lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Started her studies in Antwerp; she graduated in 2009 at the jewelry department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Before she studied cinematography and worked several years as a journalist for television. Communication and images are still an important aspect in her practice. In her work, Liesbet Bussche is constantly looking for the boundaries of the medium jewelry. With Urban jewelry, a series of interventions in the public domain, she has created new images linked to archetypes within the jewelry world. At the moment, her research leads to a development in her practice towards crossover projects, with an emphasis on jewelry, photography, printed matter and the web. 

Visiting lecturers:

Gastocenten: Esther Knobel (IL) | Evert Nijland (NL) | Yuka Oyama (JP) | Christoph Zellweger (CH) | Gijs Assmann (NL) | Erik Mattijssen (NL) | Sayaka Yamamoto (JP) | Boaz Cohen (IL) | Boy Vereecken (B) | Vera Siemund (DE) | Dinie Besems (NL) | Guy Cuypers (B) | Ruudt Peeters (NL) | Pieter Boons (B) | Tatjana Quax (NL) | Helen Carnac (UK) | David Clarke (UK) | Theo Smeets (NL) | Barbara Visser (NL) | Gemma Draper (ES) | Lin Cheung (UK) | Annick Schramme (B) | Benjamin Lignel (FR)

Galerie Ra opened in 1976 in Amsterdam and is one of the oldest galleries showing contemporary jewelry in the world. Owner Paul Derrez is a knowledgeable dealer and a jeweler himself, so when he chooses a young jeweler such as Réka Fekete for a solo show, you have to pay attention.

Susan Cummins: Réka Fekete, you are Hungarian by birth, and I understand that you moved to Amsterdam in 2004 when you were 22 years old. Do you think you brought something particularly Hungarian to your studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy?

Réka Fekete: I think it is rather my family and the environment my parents created in Hungary that most influenced my way of experiencing everything as being either fascinating, beautiful, ugly, or something else. My grandfather was a painter while my grandmother worked as a goldsmith and as a ceramicist. They had a huge studio in the basement of the house where I grew up where they worked with several other artists. The house was built in the 1930s in the Bauhaus style, and their work hung on our walls. These aspects were not particularly Hungarian, but they are what remain most present for me. I am certain that the impact of this environment left me with impressions and aesthetics I carry with me wherever I go.

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Jewelers’Werk Galerie is located in Washington, DC. The gallery represents more than 50 established art jewelers from all over the world. In this interview, Ellen Reiben discusses how the gallery came to be and answers questions posed by Missy Graff.

Missy Graff: Can you please explain how your gallery came to be located in Washington, DC, and how you chose your particular location in that city?

Ellen Reiben: Jewelers’Werk Galerie started out as V.O. Galerie in 1984. It was founded by Joke von Ommen, a Dutch jeweler who was married to an American violinist, and they lived outside of Washington, DC. She was killed in a car accident in 1988, and I took over the gallery in November of that year. For some legal reasons, the gallery name had to be changed. That was when the name Jewelers’Werk was born. At the time of Joke's death, I actually had my work in the gallery. Between 1984 and 2007, the gallery was located at 2000 Pennsylvania Avenue, close to the World Bank and the White House. In 2007, I moved the gallery to its present location on a lovely alley in Georgetown that is a bit off the beaten path but still a popular spot once people discover it. The alley shops all focus on design.

What is your background with contemporary art jewelry? What lead you to be a dealer?

Ellen Reiben: I have been involved in artists’ jewelry since 1970, when I took my first class in jewelry at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. In 1981, I got my MFA in the field from the Rochester Institute of Technology, School for American Craftsmen, in Rochester, New York, under Gary Griffin. It has always been very helpful to me to have been on the artists’ side of this business of directing a gallery, because I really do know how it is to be the artist. It is also a real plus to have such a long history in this field. It means I know what I am looking at, and I know the history of the field. I know what is new, what is derivative, and where things come from. This informed intuition and historical perspective is important for the credibility of my gallery, and I rely on it often.

Your gallery exhibits work from a large number of European artists. What are the main differences you see between the work of American and European jewelers, if any?

Ellen Reiben: When I took over the gallery, I continued with the original owner’s focus, which was to bring European artists’ jewelry to this country. I felt it was important to honor that original raison d'être, and so I have been representing International artist jewelers for 25 years.

Many jewelers are shifting toward using nontraditional materialsandincorporating found objects into their work. How do you explain the value of this type of work to those who are not familiar with contemporary art jewelry?

Ellen Reiben: When I was working on my master’s degree, I mainly used plastics—epoxy resin, acrylic, and some metal—and in the 1980s, much of the “new jewelry” was from nonprecious materials, so this isn’t exactly a new thing. Found objects have also been part of this new jewelry for many decades. When I am showing a client a piece that is comprised of nonprecious materials, I talk about how the value of this jewelry is similar to the value of a painting. A painting is not valuable because of the paint and canvas, but rather because of the artist’s perspective and concept and how it is portrayed, developed, and expressed. An art piece, whether jewelry or sculpture or painting, should have an effect on how you perceive. It should provoke you to see things in a new light. If the artist has a strong “vocabulary” in the work and an original concept and approach, it will impact its audience and enlighten the viewer. Sometimes good work enrages, too. These responses are all positive outcomes of significant and powerful work.

As the field grows and materials shift, do you see a change in the collector?

Ellen Reiben: I do see a change in the collector. The collectors I have worked with have gradually broadened their horizons and slowly come to appreciate pieces now they might have run from before! It is a matter of comfort, and gradually that comfort level evolves. The sophistication level of collectors has grown very fast in the last few years; more and more they are exposed to international work, which can be more challenging.

What is your relationship with your collectors like? Do you develop friendships? Do you take them out to dinner a lot?

Ellen Reiben: I do enjoy my relationships with collectors. I think this job is all about relationships and trust. And yes, I do develop friendships. I don't court them with lots of dinners (financially difficult for me), but there is a bond created and a social relationship often develops.

What are the three most important things you look for in an artist’s work?

Ellen Reiben: I look for originality (a fresh viewpoint and new way to express it), focus (not easily tempted to veer off or shift attitude), and mastery of materials (including using materials that fully support a concept). I personally need an artist to be easy to work with and trustworthy to complete work on time, etc.

What advice do you have for emerging artists?

Ellen Reiben: Emerging artists just need to keep working. It is all about the work. I don’t like to see a young artist spending most of his or her time self-promoting, as if this is the key to success. It is the work that counts. And it takes many years and perseverance to get work to a profound level, if it happens at all.

Thank you.

Robert Baines, Peter Bauhuis, Manfred Bischoff, Bettina Dittlmann, Georg Dobler, David Huycke, Daniel Kruger, Christa Lühtje, Bruno Martinazzi, Francesco Pavan, Dorothea Prühl,
Gerd Rothmann, Jacqueline Ryan, Philip Sajet, Bernhard Schobinger, Hubertus von Skal, Tanel Veenre, Graziano Visintin

Walking around Munich during Schmuck 2013, I noticed jewelry displayed in many places that were not typical of the traditional gallery setting or glass vitrine. There was an air of experimentation during Schmuck, with artists often adapting spaces to serve them and their work thematically or for the sake of showmanship. The venue for an exhibition seemed as important as the work. Among the exhibitions during Schmuck 2013 was the show New Jewelry for the Gods in which 18 contemporary jewelers showed their work in an antiquities museum alongside its Etruscan jewelry collection. What occurs when contemporary jewelry is shown in an antiquities museum? I was interested to see the connection, if any, between the show’s title and the work gathered by its curator Wolfgang Lösche. What was the intention of the show? Was it merely to show work by jewelry “masters,” or was it truly New Jewelry for the Gods?

As I approached the Staatliche Antikensammlungen in Munich, I felt a need to fall to my knees and bow. The museum is built in a neoclassical Greco-Roman style. It sports Greek Corinthian columns and a staircase leading up to huge metal doors. You worshiped Gods here, its stones seem to say. Inside, you are invited to look at ancient artifacts that illustrate tales of heroes, gods, and men. The antiquities museum houses the largest collection of ancient artifacts on public display in Munich and highlights the profound craft and skill of ancient potters, glassmakers, and metalworkers. It was fascinating to see contemporary art jewelry juxtaposed with artifacts of such profound cultural significance and ritual purpose; something art jewelry, I believe, may lack at the present moment.

The museum was filled with people on opening night coming to hear the speech delivered by Wolfgang Lösche. As the talk ended, I walked around the first floor wondering where all the jewelry was. The crowd seemed a bit confused, as was I, about where to go from there. I circled the space many times until I finally noticed people traveling down a centrally located stairway. The gods, it seemed, were hidden away in the basement. The basement had many adjacent rooms with both ancient jewelry and the work of contemporary jewelers. By using standard glass vitrines and displaying the contemporary work as it does artifacts elsewhere, the museum appeared to have approached the display of contemporary jewelry with the intention of creating a connection rather than a contrast to its permanent collection.

The work shown was certainly of the highest standard. However, the manner in which it was shown, the context, and the title all seemed like a shot in the dark, a missed opportunity to explore a topic the project seemed to beg for. Contextually, the work seemed out of place. There were many makers with great reputations, but most had little in common with one another. The recognizable style of the selected pieces meant that I read them as markers of distinct authorial positions. This was in contrast to the antiquities in the permanent collection. We are not used to thinking of their makers as authors or artists in the modern sense. As a matter of fact, they come with coordinates that situate them in time and space rather than stylistic development. The statement for the show also proved to be an interesting backdrop to view or understand the work. It described that the exhibition as consisting of 18 goldsmiths’ work. Did it?

There were, in fact, two silversmiths in the group of artists, David Huycke and Peter Bauhuis. Both have distinctly different approaches that are, in my opinion, somewhat antithetical to each other. Bauhuis uses a number of different metals and casts very basic, even archaic, forms (bowls, rings and other objects). These objects bear the patina of use, and—at least to the eye—appear ancient. Their surfaces are painted with streaks of gold, copper, and silver that take on hues of blue, sienna red, and vibrant green. In contrast, Huycke's pieces are illustrative. They take their inspiration from the ancient technique of granulation, one of the most widely used techniques during the Etruscan period. But instead of copying this technique, Huycke enlarges the micro world of granulation into giant objects, bowls, and odd forms. In effect, he takes granulation and brings it into the contemporary realm, giving it the flair of sleek and sexy design. Simple round shapes appear very futuristic, like large models of atomic particles all colliding. While Bauhuis pushes the present into the past, not to replicate but to extract and elaborate, Huycke reaches into the past and pushes toward the future, re-contextualizing an ancient technique into a modern scientific perspective, in what one might call a quantum leap.

Also included in the show is Tanel Veenre, an artist I couldn’t quite categorize. His pieces straddle the line between goldsmithing and contemporary art jewelry. His material choices have always been incredibly diverse, verging on the opulent and comical, but his traditional use of stones as focal points or compositional accents, his stone setting methodology and fabrication procedures, and his use of goldsmith catches and mechanisms betray a strong lineage with tradition. His pieces also were some of the most god-like pieces on display. One featured a sparkling encrusted crab shell with a large royal gem mounted on it, an item fit for a mythological portrait.

I believe one could say that all the artists were skilled makers. However, the use of the term goldsmith reduces or restricts some of the important assets the contemporary jewelry on display possessed. Bettina Dittlmann’s pieces, for example, are constructed from fragile steel wire. Many of her pieces are enameled with garnets held by the most basic of claw settings. While they do not look like traditional goldsmithing, my educated guess is that they require a great deal of skill since one must know how to solder or weld in such tight spaces. The works of Dorothea Prühl could similarly be perceived as lacking skill, if judged from a goldsmith’s perceptive. I don’t know if I would consider Prühl a goldsmith. Her work is iconic, powerful, and simply made. She used the skill that was necessary to do what she wanted. However, like Dittlmann’s work, Prühl’s denies us the look of skill or masterfulness that is evident in the works of Robert Baines, Georg Dobler, David Huycke Daniel Kruger, Christa Lühtje, Bruno Martinazzi, Francesco Pavan, Gerd Rothmann, Jacqueline Ryan, Phillip Sajet, and Graziano Visintin—people who obviously could fit the bill of goldsmith. In short, I think the term goldsmith simplifies what this group of jewelers represents, and this simplification undercuts the authorial position of each maker and creates a homogenous view where there is none.

My point is merely this: the grouping method this exhibition utilizes takes the author out of the jewelry, disconnecting the made from the maker. It is important to note that the notion of authorship is paramount to understanding the contemporary jewelry phenomenon. Technical descriptions and material lists do help, but they give a simplistic view of what constitutes the work. Similarly, one can’t merely catalogue the pieces. One needs to draw a timeline that includes the lives of pivotal artists, their reciprocal influence, etc. In contrast, the ancient artifact collection does not deliver an author—it can’t—and this is not a decisive factor in its appreciation. So, are we to look at the work of the contemporaries through this same lens?

My largest concern is whether the power of contemporary jewelry is not somehow undermined by being juxtaposed with culturally relevant work and by being asked to perform in a way it will inevitably fall short. If we were to walk into a museum where there was a show about the historical development of jewelry, I would gladly see pieces by Tanel Veenre and Manfred Bischoff next to those of ancient Egyptian jewelers. However, this is not a show about observing a progression, plotting a timeline, or making a strong thematic link between two areas of the same field. It is a show of contemporary jewelry within an antiquities museum labeled New Jewelry For The Gods. By establishing or attempting to create a relationship between work past and present, the show squashes the power of art jewelry.

First, art jewelry is made by artists who, unlike their ancient predecessors, have nearly unlimited access to established art theories, to a multitude of theological and ideological perspectives, and are not isolated within their own region. In that respect, they stand here less as documents of a particular stylistic or technical development than as artists who consciously take positions within a multifaceted field. Next, the individuality of differing perspectives is important to art jewelry while in a historical timeline, you look for trends, consistency, and styles. That is how you build a narrative. By disconnecting the contemporary jewelry work from its context and freezing it into a historical perspective, this curation artifactualizes the objects on display and kills the art of it all. The individual artistic voice or ideological stance of each artist is diluted because of this method. When you take a title with such commanding presence as New Jewelry for the Gods and deliver work that seems connected in essence but cannot find cultural agency on similar terms as the work in the ancient collection, there is a let down, a dissonance.

This dissonance is related to the ways in which we recognize cultural relevance as it pertains to antiquities. The objects on display are described as amulets, possessing symbolic and sign-like qualities. These qualities are identified and underlined for the viewer through immense research into historical practices, religions, and iconography within the cultures from which the ancient collection originates. The ancient pieces were shaped by religious beliefs and customary rituals. They incarnate, so to speak, these beliefs and rituals and have the nonchalant power of objects with a given place in a social organization. They form a visual catalogue of human existence for cultures, people, and practices lost in time. If we are to judge contemporary jewelry using these premises, they seem culturally irrelevant and dislocated from anything that could activate them as cultural instruments. They do not perceivably serve a theological basis or an ideological one. The fact is that the work of the contemporary artists does not appear to serve the same purpose as that of the ancient masters.

There are only a handful of jewelers who have risen to the challenge of tackling ideological beliefs and the proliferation of social commentary. Otto Künzli’s oeuvre is an amazing example of this. His pieces were not just an embodiment of his time—a capsule—but were a contributing voice and critique of the times. During Schmuck, there was a large retrospective of Künzli’s work. Viewing the show, I came across a piece called Cotzicteocuitlatl. A multitude of small to large pendants reminiscent of the Mickey Mouse ears were made to appear of ancient origins, and the title is a tip of the hat to where. In fact, these pieces are read as a commentary of the USA’s cultural history, literally making a tongue in cheek reference to people that were killed and a culture that was lost, but also to the way American culture has infiltrated Central America. Unlike the curator of New Jewelry for the Gods, Künzli chose to use jewelry’s artifactual ability as a strategy.

Did New Jewelry for the Gods live up to its name? Unfortunately, no. The cohesion of the show and the relationship between title and concept seemed inappropriate. It appeared to be a missed opportunity to observe the cultural relevance and significance of work being made today. I believe a more concrete comparison or drawing of similarities and differences may have helped the audience see the relevance of the contemporary work. Its operation is, of course, different, but I believe the curator could have consciously utilized these differences and acknowledged them rather than not touching on them at all. Possibly, the work could be contextualized in the next attempt at a show like this. Where does it live? Who owns it? What do they do with it? Because even though it may be mundane to us, this is what will help generations to come to gauge the importance of this young field’s output. A show that extols the connections between the pieces through a stylistic or technical comparison or even through the way in which each party utilizes symbols, visual vocabularies, and thematic content may have proved more successful. 

Beatriz Defeo, who was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1948, came to Europe almost by chance. An invitation to join a theater group (“if you can sing and dance, you’ll be fine”) lured her away from a budding career in journalism at the tender age of 24 (she had been reporting on football at the age of 18). She came to Holland in 1972, stayed with the company for eight years, and soon started to collect and sell modernist decorative objects. What started as a hobby soon became her profession. She bought what she liked (Gerrit Rietveld, Alvar Aalto) but only kept a few pieces. She made a living out of selling the rest.

While her interest in jewelry dates from the mid 1970s (the earliest works she bought were by Georg Jensen and Vivianna Torun Bülow-Hübe), she makes her official entrance on the jewelry auction scene in 2008, when Frédéric Chambre, then a partner at Pierre Bergé et associés (Brussels), suggested she organize a jewelry sale for them. She was in charge of all the jewelry sales at Bergé between 2008 and 2012, and she just tested her mettle by organizing one for Piasa, in the tougher Parisian environment (Tuesday, June 18^th, 2013). Lack of credible competition makes her the de facto leader in the contemporary jewelry auction scene worldwide. This one-woman band is pretty much the only person who has tried to sell contemporary jewelry in auctions, and she tells us why it is looking promising.

Benjamin Lignel: You used to work for Pierre Bergé and were in charge of jewelry sales. When did you start, how did you become a jewelry specialist, and what steered you toward contemporary jewelry?

Beatriz Defeo: I was not a specialist in 2008, and I am still not a specialist. Everybody says I am an expert, but I am really not sure what an expert is or that I would qualify as one. I have always followed my taste and little else. When Frédéric Chambre (then partner at Pierre Bergé) asked me to organize a sale, he had seen the jewelry I was wearing and knew the style of objects I liked. I told him about the type of work I would like to sell—Torun, The Campana Brothers, Chi ha paura … ?, but he was really going on a gut feeling that I could pull it off. And so was I. When he offered me the job, I thought about it for 15 minutes, and then said yes. I still would not really describe myself as a collector. I am more of a buyer. I buy what I like and don’t follow the criteria of a collector. My purchase decisions are not systematic or strategic. I often sell work from my collection or give pieces away to friends. This “collection” is not constructed or expanded or maintained as one.

How does one organize a contemporary jewelry sale? Do you mind taking us through the different steps, from start to finish?

Beatriz Defeo: The last sale (at Piasa) took four months to put together. Typically, I start by contacting collectors. I work with a few great collectors who are happy to sell parts of their collection. They all started buying in the 60s and 70s and made discerning choices during those early days. Collectors from this pioneering generation now have to decide whether they want to gift their collection to museums—and some find no reason for doing so—or leaving them for their kids. If their children do not share their interest for jewelry, then auctions are an attractive alternative. So I call them up, and we normally exchange about the sort of sale I am putting together and what pieces I would like to have. I want good work, but at the same time, I know that very expensive pieces will be difficult to sell. For their part, collectors typically want their consignment to be a mix of remarkable and less remarkable pieces.

After I have put together a core of works, I talk to galleries and artists and see how I can complete it with more recent work by living artists. This phase, the selection phase, takes two to three months. For the Piasa sale, I began in February and closed the selection in April. Then, I write the description for each of the 174 lots I selected—date, technique, material, edition size, dimensions—and this is probably the most time consuming part of the job. The next stage is to shoot. I work with a photographer for the day or couple of days it takes to shoot everything, and then I put together the sequence of lots. I print out images of all the pieces, organize them as I think best, and hand over this wad to the auctioneer, who will have the final say. His decision will be influenced by layout consideration, but usually it is not hugely different from my own.

The sequence is a delicate thing. The last sale was not absolutely chronological, for example. I grouped things that I thought dialogued well together. I also made sure that there were some “high notes” throughout the sale. If you put all the best pieces together in one part of the sale, you won’t keep your audience interested throughout.

Tell us a little bit more about price evaluation. It must be difficult to assess the value of work by very contemporary makers. What do you rely on? Do you speak to the galleries or the artists to get a sense of market value?

Beatriz Defeo: When I work directly with artists, such as Dinie Besems with whom I have been working with for some time, it is quite simple. I want to protect them from too-low estimates that undermine their work. So, I make sure the price reflects where they are in their career. I have discussions with the artists, and we decide together what an appropriate price might be. In my mind, auctions are there to establish and raise the profile of artists. Today, auctions and fairs can do that. Before, this was the sole prerogative of galleries.

Auction houses are usually associated with the secondary market and re-sell objects that have previous owners. I know that you have accepted (and requested) pieces directly from artists. Does that not put the auction house in direct competition with galleries? How did you resolve this problem?

Beatriz Defeo: No, we are not in competition. Galleries welcome the publicity that auctions give their artists. On the one hand, this has to do with the fact that contemporary jewelry is still a pretty confidential field. Not many people know about it. Auctions attract a varied clientele that specialized galleries may not always be able to reach. Also, on some level, galleries realize that artists are their own agents who can generate their own promotion and sales initiatives. In that respect, the 2008 auction of Damien Hirst works by Damien Hirst, was a game changer—for better or for worse.

One of the assumptions we make is that contemporary jewelry sales do not generate a lot of interest or big sales. Would you agree? Do you think there is a future for this sort of work in auctions?

Beatriz Defeo: On the whole, my track record with Bergé has been very successful. Sales have averaged around two-thirds of the global low estimation. So, for a sale totaling 300,000 euros worth of pieces, I would normally sell around 200,000 euros. I consider this a success given the small size of this market. It is difficult, however, to compare artist and contemporary jewelry with other departments in the same auction house. Some departments— the more popular art periods, for example—are used to higher numbers, others departments to lower ones.

My feeling is that the trend is positive. In the course of my four-year collaboration with Bergé, I have noticed a slow but steady increase in interest for jewelry due in part to the work we were doing. Collectors who may have bought a piece in our first jewelry sale have tended to come back, perhaps excited by the prospect that this was not a one-time gig. So yes, there is a future for this sort of work in auction, but there is still a lot of work to do (and I wish I was not the only one doing it!).

Do you make a distinction between artist jewelry and contemporary jewelry?

Beatriz Defeo: Of course I make the distinction. To some extent, I accept the common definition that artist jewelry is made (or at least designed) by people for whom it is not the main medium while contemporary jewelry is authored by people who only do this and do it from start to finish. However, my attitude toward those distinctions has changed. I am not sure anymore that separating one from the other—as I used to do in the Bergé catalogues—is really such a good idea. Dinie [Besems], Ted [Noten], and Gijs [Bakker] are all artists in my eye. Therefore, in the Piasa catalogue, I have consciously avoided putting them “in little boxes.”

The presale exhibition is a slightly different thing. There I allow myself to be a bit more didactic and explain to visitors what the differences are between this and that type of jewelry.

The Piasa sale included pieces by artists, by designers, by contemporary jewelers, by fashion designers, and by silversmithing pioneers. A fine art equivalent would be to have paintings by Winslow Homer, Andy Warhol, Takeshi Kitano, and Frank Gehry in the same sale. Do you think that, at some point in the future, the market for art jewelry will be sufficiently established to distinguish between those different types of jewelry?

Beatriz Defeo: Of course, it is possible to do a contemporary-jewelry-only sale—possible, but not necessarily advisable. What happens, and what happened again last week at Piasa, is that different types of jewelry will attract different types of buyers. There are collectors of art jewelry who come for the Max Ernst, the Picasso, the Calder pieces. Then I have private clients—more often than not 35­- to 45-years old—who may be lured in by the artist jewelry but will end up buying what they fall in love with. They are less discriminating than committed collectors and can happily purchase work by a painter, a sculptor, and a goldsmith in the same sale as happened last week. Finally, there are museums. These three groups—collectors, private buyers, and museums—look at the catalogue following a more or less specific agenda. But at the end of the day, they will look at everything and may well be persuaded to buy something that they did not have the slightest intention to buy in the first place simply because it is sitting on a page opposite to the thing they came for.

As I told you before, I am also interested in the dialogue that exists between the different branches of jewelry. I share Marjan Unger’s opinion that keeping contemporary jewelry separate from all others types of jewelry is a bit sterile. More prosaically, a single-type sale would also be very risky. The demand for contemporary jewelry at auction is still very tentative, and it will need the company of artist jewelry to get the crowds in for some time yet.

The Precious Design sale at Piasa, your new employer, came with a roundtable titled “The Spectacular Growth of Art Jewelry.” Can you tell us about this spectacular growth? What are its telltale signs? Who are the buyers? The sellers?

Beatriz Defeo: Probably the most telling sign of this growth is the sharp increase in jewelry offerings at fairs. Tefaf and Art Basel Miami are now showcasing five or six galleries that propose jewelry compared to only one or two galleries four years ago. Some of the galleries hail from the design world, with works from Ettore Sotsass for example. Others come from the art world, and finally others from the contemporary jewelry scene. This is not quite “spectacular” yet, but it certainly is a welcome improvement. If the trend continues— and there is no reason it should not—then the market will probably become stronger, and with it, our ability to take some risks.

What is the role and value of auctions in the larger marketplace from the point of view of the collector and for the artist?

Beatriz Defeo: I feel mostly responsible for the contemporary jewelry community. My role, as I see it, is to raise the profile of those artists I like, to open up the market to new collectors, and generally to increase the exposure of this small field to a wider audience. The Netherlands and Belgium, where I have lived most of my life, are a less hostile environment than France. Holland, especially, embraced contemporary jewelry early on and is home to its pioneering artists, collectors, and galleries. France, on the other hand, is very conservative. People are mostly interested in artist jewelry and traditional, precious materials. The Piasa sale, from that point of view, was a risk because I didn’t know many people it would attract locally. The sale did OK thanks to a few very attractive lots, but it could have been more successful. (66 of the 174 lots were sold for a total of 185,865 euros ($243,380) before the buyer’s premium. The complete value of the sale, at low estimate, was around 250 000 euros.) Put differently, I know that I will have telephone bidders wherever I might organize a jewelry sale next. I have a strong base of collectors who trust my eye and have grown appreciative of the sort of work I select for my sales. The question is, will the walk-in clients come?

Galerie Spektrum in Munich, Germany, is showing the well-known jeweler and professor Ramón Puig Cuyàs from Barcelona, Spain. Ramón and his students have been an active part of the jewelry scene for many years, so it is a wonderful opportunity to hear more about his background and reasons for making.

Susan Cummins: Ramon, please tell us the story of how you became a jeweler?

Ramón Puig Cuyàs: I think I’ve always been a lucky person. When I was young, I had three ideas of what I wanted to be when I grew up—devote myself to science, in particular, biology or astronomy, or like my father, who was a ship captain in the merchant marines, I wanted to be a sailor and travel to exotic lands. The third option was art. It’s a bit hard to explain why I decided against the first two options, and I have already discussed this at length in previous interviews. I feel I could have become almost any type of artist except a musician. I had no clue what jewelry was or any interest in it. My grandmother was an opera singer, my uncle was a cartoonist and illustrator, and I’ve always liked to draw and to build things with my hands. I’ve always been very curious about the world around me, and I try to understand how it works, to discover new horizons, and to always see a bit beyond the obvious.

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Rebecca Hannon’s work, at Jewelers’Werk Galerie in Washington, DC this month, is a fascinating study of the relationship of gender roles to jewelry as well as a study in scale and materiality. Her residency on a French Polynesian island allowed for some really innovative jewelry.

Susan Cummins: Can you tell the story of how you discovered that you wanted to be a jeweler?

Rebecca Hannon: I grew up in Virginia, and my high school art teacher took me to the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan to be his metalsmithing assistant one summer. He had a few art jewelry catalogues with him, and they were unlike anything I had ever seen. (Imagine, pre-Internet!) I carefully re-drew Hermann Jünger and other jewelers’ work in my journal, as I was sure I would never see such amazing things again. I made jewelry for everyone that summer and loved this connection, person to person, through an object. I went on to major in jewelry and metals at Rhode Island School of Design.

Are you teaching now?

Rebecca Hannon: I teach full time at the top Canadian art school Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, nestled in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This working port town is bursting with creative energy. I teach color, design, and 3-D courses and really love working with students who are starting their artistic journey. Their curiosity and openness fuels me. In summers, I teach workshops in New York City and beyond to keep this part of my practice active.

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This year’s week-long jewelry gathering was slightly sadder for being so well mapped out. The Handwerkskammer provided the program, Current Obsession, a newly launched magazine, came with a large foldout map, which was a nice complement to the street finder published and given out by gallerist Zenga Biro. To be absolutely certain of your itinerary, it was best to check those against state-sponsored street and underground maps and your own Google map. And so, people took to the street with sheaves of printed matter, occasionally fumbled with them but rarely got lost. Gone was the sight of wandering clots of Italians, French, or English jewelers looking up the sky for planetary direction. We knew where we were going.

Soon enough, more papers were added to the purely functional ones—visiting cards (hello! direct sale!), exhibition flyers, leaflets, catalogues, or books (in increasing order of permanence and budget) as well as project descriptions (Zimmerhof is coming up. Helen Britton is in Nürnberg. Yes, “Irony Forest” is at the southern exit of Universität). These were used to establish the positions—both geographical and discursive—of the nebula of projects presented in Munich. Similar to exhibition setups, printed matters were used to deploy, using graphic tools, the artistic agenda of individual projects. They ranged from the punkish to the corporate, could be self assured or tentative, descriptive or poetic, but in all cases, tried to live up to their fate as wallet-bound forget-me-nots. The AJF team harvested them on the way, and thought it would be a nice idea to decipher their relationship to the practice to which they refer. Are they evidence, manufactured fictions, or illustrations?

Collected Matters

Susan Cummins

I am a collector, and I have made a specific collection. I acquire chosen pieces of jewelry then document and store them with the idea that someday I will give the collection to a museum. But am I an archivist? Do I also want to collect all of the things that are created to contextualize the jewelry that I have decided to acquire? Do I want to store, organize, and preserve all of the papers, invitations, booklets, catalogues, pricelists, magazines, and books that I pick up at an event like Schmuck? What is worth preserving? Am I trying to document the actual event, or is this material that adds meaning and depth to the collection? Everything that goes into my library is catalogued and housed on special shelves and in cabinets, so space and effort are required to keep it. So, the question of what to keep becomes challenging, and I knew I was going to have to make a selection when I returned from Munich with, as usual, lots of printed matter.

All the stuff I picked up at Schmuck created a foot-high pile and simply wouldn’t fit into my suitcase, so I sent myself a box. The contents from the box sat around on my office floor until recently when I finally laid it all out to see what was there and make some choices about what was worth keeping. As I made my way through the material, I began to detect reasons for keeping some things. I thought that I would have very intellectually based reasons for keeping everything, but as it turned out, many of the reasons were purely emotionally based and not rational at all. However, a book such as Otto Künzli:The Book is, of course, a rational choice. It is a very ambitious effort and well worth spending time reading to add to my knowledge of an artist whose work I have in my collection. Additional hardcover catalogues, for example Aftermath of Art Jewellery, with essays by respected writers are also easy picks. The other rational choices are the Schmuck 2013 and Talente 2013 catalogues. These are simply good reference materials and reminders of what was seen. As I look at them again at home, I ask myself if this or that artist is someone I will begin to see over and over again, until I finally take note of his or her name and begin actively tracking a career. This might be a first introduction.

The place where the emotions began to kick in was when I got to the small Kadri Mälk catalogue given to me very ceremoniously by two of her former students, Piret Hirv and Eve Margus-Villems, and signed, “Cordially, * * * * * Kadri Mälk.” It is a catalogue of a show she had called paranatellonta, and the text is about the process of making. Although very modest in size, this publication was a gem and definitely worth keeping for documentation’s sake. Sally Marsland personally handed me her catalogue. I was delighted to meet her face-to-face after having thoroughly enjoyed working on an AJF blog with her. I was happy to have a hard copy of her way with words. Sondra Sherman handed me a small catalogue made by her students, and I was thrilled to see (and preserve) evidence that San Diego State University was represented in Munich, even if only in the form of a catalogue. Ellen Maurer-Zilioli handed me a book on Peter Skubic, who she insisted I needed to know more about. Since I don’t collect his work, I will only keep this because she said so.

The things I won’t keep are cards, pricelists, materials about schools I have no relationship with, and information about artists whose work isn’t of interest. In the end, for me, the main reason for collecting all of the printed matter is its relationship to the artists whose jewelry is in the collection. The library I have acquired helps me to understand the ideas and stories about certain artists, but it is also a collection of stuff that will go where the jewelry goes. I am under the impression that collectors will often add libraries to their bequests. Whether or not my collection actually ends up in a museum, it is certainly both an expression of my personal taste and a partial witness of what happened in our field during the past 20 years. It seems, therefore, especially important for documentation to accompany the jewelry, especially from a field as young as this one and especially for museums without jewelry collections that would need to contextualize it. For these reasons, I think of the library and the jewelry as inseparable.

Please, Can Someone Tell Me Where I Am?

Aaron Patrick Decker

Stepping off the plane and onto the ground of a foreign city, the first things one should do are finding one’s bearing and grab a map. In Munich, there is a train directly from the airport to the city center, making the commute simple and easy. The maps available use symbols, names, and colors to create a visual vocabulary you can read even if German is not your native tongue. This is what maps are meant to do, symbolically orient us within a three-dimensional space through a two-dimensional representation. The accessibility and universality of their symbols, in fact, is key to their success. During Schmuck, however, a city map won’t tell you where all the jewelry exhibitions are or where the Internationale Handwerksmesse fair is. You must either know where you are going streetwise or have access to the Internet to search Google maps. I am unaware of any attempts prior to Schmuck 2013 to provide exhibition route planners for non-residents. This year, this problem was attacked from two sides.

Wolfgang Lösche’s team at the Handwerk fair collated a list of activities and shows as usual, addresses included. This was not a visual map, but it provided the backbone to the other two. Galerie Biro, junior put together a booklet called the “Schmuck-Finder” that contained a map that pinpointed a limited number of shows along with the addresses, artists involved, opening hours, and images of each artist’s work. Current Obsession magazine, with their first issue, created a large foldout map of the city of Munich marked with small dots. The numbered dots referred to a list of shows ordered by opening dates and times and featured short descriptions of each show.

The cartographical enterprise for Schmuck has seemingly bloomed in this past year. Putting the Handwerk list aside (it is self-admittedly just a list and nothing else), I wonder how useful these maps truly were. Did they fulfill the promise to easily show us how to get where we needed to go? Were these maps independent—did they operate without the need for supplemental material (i.e. U-bahn maps, city maps)? Were the maps holistic? That is, did they attempt to highlight each show, event, opening, party, etc. that took place during Schmuck?

The “Schmuck-Finder” 2013 was a good resource for finding shows. It contained several maps that were cut and pasted from actual city maps. Unfortunately, I found the cut-and-paste method a bit disorienting because it splintered the city into parts. I knew that once I arrived in the area the map highlighted, I could navigate it. The only problem was, how to get to this area? I had to check my city map to see where the maps matched up, and then find the right U-Bahn train to get there. Working from three printed references at once is not what I would call user friendly. More unexpectedly still, the “Schmuck-Finder” only featured a select number of exhibitions that seemed tied to artists involved with Galerie Biro. This limited representation was most likely purposeful, and from a commercial perspective, smart. The guide was meant to highlight the things and people the coordinator of the “Schmuck-Finder” found important and wanted people to see and buy.

Current-Obsession’s map was the most well rounded one of them all but still lacked certain information that was desperately needed. The map gave a schematic plan of the city, so if you knew where you were on the map at any particular point, you could easily find your way around the city based on the shapes and directions of the streets. However, both the streets and the U-Bahn station markers on the map had no names. If you didn’t know the area, you couldn’t really connect the “U” with a station name. I did enjoy the map’s minimal aesthetic, but I found it flawed as I found myself constantly checking that map against the U-bahn plan and those city maps. While it did not do a whole lot better than the “Schmuck-Finder” in terms of directions, the Current Obsession map had quite a few things the other did not. For starters, the numbered dots referred to a list of shows ordered by opening date and time. It was incredibly well structured and made for an easy (if erratic) itinerary planning. The event descriptions were young and hip but informative, too. They had images and dialogued well with the longer essays and interviews featured inside of the Current Obsession magazine itself.

Maps and event calendars will continue to crop up to accompany the growth of our field and of the fair-related events. I was interested to understand if the presence of two navigation devices signaled increased market viability. I asked Marina Elenskaya, editor-in-chief of Current Obsession, about the profitability of the project and the likelihood of Current Obsession doing another map for the next edition of Schmuck. The magazine did turn a profit, but this was not the main reason for making the map. She explained, “Schmuck Guide was a perfect way for us to launch the magazine about jewelry most successfully and to give it maximum exposure. We also did it for fun because while being in Munich for Schmuck 2012, we had to Google a lot of people for hours and then Google the locations, too—what a nightmare!”

It is my hope that future mapmakers strongly study the accessibility, structure, and navigational power of their maps. They should create a map that doesn’t need pre-existing ones to function, but operates on its own and is informative both visually and through its coverage of each event. When asked about the functionality of their map and whether they will do one for Schmuck 2014, Elenskaya replied, “Yes. We would like to a make Schmuck guide for next year. The process of making such a guide is super painstaking. It requires a lot of precision and a lot of emailing. Nevertheless, we really enjoyed it. For the next year, we are planning to collaborate with Müncheners to get some help with the mapping. We would like to make the map better and more detailed, including the U-Bahn and S-Bahn stops and things like that. We like the idea of including places to eat, have coffee, etc. and are planning to do it again.”

What do these maps make visible other than the geographical locations of the Schmuck events? Looking at them gave me a sense of the scope and remarkable growth of the program in the past 10 years. (In 2004, the year the first program was printed, it listed 12 events; in 2013, it had 67.) If, as I hypothesize, these maps and the multiplication of events bear witness to the success of our field, then by that measure it is doing very well. Being of a cautious nature, I will wait and see if the field believes in accessibility and exposure and is prepared to pay for ads in forthcoming editions of the maps.  

Words Worth

Marthe Le Van

My interest in selecting and arranging words into cogent thoughts borders on obsession. At the same time, I harbor a rather hostile attitude toward reading most curatorial text. This antagonistic relationship causes a fierce and persistent internal conflict. I am glad to have the opportunity to question its existence using Schmuck as a backdrop. Come with me to confession.

In choosing to wrestle with this topic, I am afraid of being judged frivolous. Am I an apathetic viewer if I do not read the writing on the wall or in print? Am I foolish to want to grasp a concept or theme without clarification? Am I arrogant to value my experience more than well-researched curatorial explanations and different points of view? Am I simply not smart enough (or not schooled enough) to understand how these texts are essential to my comprehension? Do I fancy myself too gifted or am I too pompous to need them? Is writing a required wall in the whole house of cards? Is it merely a case of a busman’s holiday?

Ignoring exhibit text is not a new development. Even my child-size brain knew that museums were where the art lived, and I would let nothing stand in my way of getting up close and personal with it. I despised the obligatory group tours and occasional headsets. “No one tells me what’s important!” I knew what I liked and made a beeline to stand in front and absorb it. And I knew what I didn’t like and still don’t like—stereotypes, hierarchies, and gratuitous veneration.

Fast forward to Schmuck 2013, and I am standing outside the Otto Künzli retrospective, itching to discuss the artist, the artwork, and the exhibit. There is much murmuring about a lack of text both on the wall and on the showcases. As a matter of fact, this was the most urgent topic on the minds of my colleagues as we shared our initial thoughts on the exhibit. With little writing offered, how could the masses accurately understand the work or appreciate the artist? (Damian Skinner fully articulates this in his superb review “A Künzli for Our Time?”)

In all honesty, the lack of text never even entered my mind. Was I missing some sort of internal curatorial checklist? I was initially puzzled, but now know that this jolt was pivotal to my growth. At Schmuck 2013, I became aware that the emotional experience of art fits me and feels better than its intellectual counterpart. I strongly believe in art’s ability to be profound and transformative. Onsite exhibition text is useful for providing the “who, what, when, where, and why.” When it strays into commentary or assertion, however, it does not work for self-directed viewers like me. I feel it degrades, even intimidates, the legitimacy of individual interpretation and infringes on a sacred space.

Words were used to steer and shape my Schmuck experience at every turn. Some were effective. One of the text panels introducing Neuer Schmuck für Götter offered a solid explanation of art jewelry. I was so impressed that I took a photo of this notably concise (but badly hyphenated) gem. In retrospect, it reads like a free Internet translation (see photo).

The professor-docents of ConSpiración: EASD València y Escola Massana supported their students’ work well. One teacher accompanied me the length of her display tables, tailoring her explanations to correspond to my perceived interest. She positioned and pitched the work with enviable skill.

At Fallmamal-Umsturz erwünscht, I fell deeply in love with Anja Eichler’s jewelry, read her entire catalogue on the spot, and bought a copy. I related to Eichler’s writing as well as her jewelry—both are capable of expressing vulnerability because both are built on a secure foundation.

At Bucks & Barter, the need to express the show’s concept seemed stronger than the concept itself. Before Schmuck, I received a detailed press release on the show. After viewing the exhibit, its brief was retold to me. A lot of words came with this small show. They accompanied me to the space, chased me through it, hindered my exit, and didn’t feed me anything new.

Like most Schmuck attendees, I amassed a big bag of printed materials and schlepped them home—a satisfying (and affordable) means of collecting, but perhaps more significantly, a vestige of pre-Internet life. Perhaps one day I will want to revisit the exhibits with something I can hold in my hand, but for now the stash remains tucked under my desk—even while writing this essay.

When I need to fact check details or read an artist’s statement, the web delivers faster than I can thumb through a pile of postcards and flyers. If all exhibit materials were digital, they would be easier to organize and access, they would create less waste paper, and one could chose to investigate them at will.

In contrast to Damian Skinner’s position in A Künzli for Our Time? ¹, I believe objects can speak for themselves. I feel they often do so more eloquently and persuasively than their translators, and the best environment is one where viewers can listen, connect, and know them. This ability is what sets the good objects apart. To assert this approach as anti-intellectual is to restrict the definition of intelligence. I like to think that the body of truth that exists in all artwork is summoned from many types of intelligence. Thereby, the effort toward understanding it should be a holistic and ongoing study that embraces the intellect but does not acquiesce to it.

Das Buch

Benjamin Lignel

Hufnagl, Florian, ed. Otto Künzli. Das Buch, Jacqueline Burckhardt, Walter Grasskamp, Carole Guinard, Florian Hufnagl, Otto Künzli, Ellen Maurer-Zilioli, Pravu Mazumdar, Chantal Prod’Hom, Akio Seki (authors), Munich/Stuttgart: Die Neue Sammlung, Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2013

Plonk. 6.5 pounds. 696 pages. 1000+ illustrations. 9 authors (and an editorial staff of eight). Otto Künzli. Das Buch is to printed matters what Moby Dick is to pole fishing magazines. It is monumental, it is definitive, it is heavy, and it certainly tries very hard to plot the course of Künzli’s oeuvre as it zigzags up, down, and across his favorite hunting grounds. The person doing the plotting, it would appear, is Künzli himself. He is listed on the masthead under “Conception,” directly below Prof. Doctor Hufnagl (editor) and above the nine authors.

 If my assumption is right and Professor Künzli had a pervasive influence on the conception and design of the book, it would explain a certain enjoyable quirkiness in this awaited monograph. Firstly, the organizational system is chronological but presented as if it were thematic. Künzli follows the artistic convention of presenting work as distinct “bodies.” Recurring themes or forms from the same period are allowed to pool together, but the book appears to hopscotch between different categorizing systems. Works are sometimes grouped according to formal archetype (Hearts, House), place (Japan), project (Miki Motto), or theme (USA # ONE), and the actual sequence of things is very slightly rearranged to adapt to Künzli’s neater version of the story under chapter headings that make no reference to time or progress. The result lets the reader enjoy the work less as a history than as a catalogue of creative stories that dialogue with one another from the safety of their individual chapter.

Secondly, the book provides evidence of Künzli’s creative output through a wide range of material—photos of work; photos of photos of work; poster, magazine, and newspaper reproductions; installation shots; and performance shots. This is by no means uncommon in an art book. But while art historians like to bookend their presentation of artworks with source material and examples of cultural dissemination, they tend to do it in black and white, to ensure the primacy of the work over its documentation. Not so here. Künzli seems to delight (as does the contemporary jewelry field at large) in seeing his work reduplicated in images. There are 43 facsimile reproductions in the book, and a conscious effort has gone into presenting these documents and the things they document on an equal footing, as if to erase the ontological distinction that might exist between, say, this photo of the Black house brooch and its reproduction to scale on a exhibition announcement on the opposite page.

The wealth and quality of the images bear testimony to Künzli’s effective use of photography on the one hand, and makes a good case for the fact he works as a visual artist. Like some of his contemporaries and many of his students, Künzli has tried to turn jewelry’s codependence on the human body to his advantage by staging use. From the very earlyAutomatenfotos (1976) to the recent Sumi photographs (2008), Künzli (or his camera-totting relatives) used a deadpan visual style to repackage his experimental excesses under the guise of inventories (not unlike Bernd and Hilla Becher) with deadly efficiency. In some cases, such as the Körperkultur series (1979–80), the Kollektion Künzli (1982), or the Schönheistgalerie (1984), the work exists primarily—or only—as images illustrating the possible use of objects few people will ever see, let alone touch. Künzli’s decision to record something possible, but unlikely, is far from insignificant. It was coherent with the systematic and experimental nature of his early work, and it also opened the door for the field at large to make “unwearable” propositions. Künzli was not the only one doing this then, but unlike his peers (such as Emmy Van Leersum and Gijs Bakker), his reliance on photography largely defines his output over the years and seems to have had a major influence on his students at the Munich Akademie. Printed matter aficionados like myself will regret that more emphasis is not put on this lesser-known aspects of Künzli’s work. (One of its highlights is his layout for the wallpaper brooches, emulating the visual style of home furnishing catalogues and reproduced in 1983’s Kollektion Künzli exhibition catalogue.)

In turn, the success of Künzli’s work in print—the fact, as Mazumdar cogently argues in his essay, that one of his primary operations is the “reduction of jewelry to one dimension”—informs the way most of the texts, and ultimately the book itself, represent the artist’s work as a set of emblems that carry out symbolic operations and are essentially dealt with using an art-historical critical toolbox on a case-by-case basis. The two meatier essays, by Pravu Mazumdar and Ellen Maurer-Zillioli, walk us through some of the more pivotal works created by Künzli and essentially try to reveal to us how jewelry, and in particular this jewelry, has the capacity to unleash (or contain) important concepts. Those two voices are quite different, however, and provide the reader with a good measure of insights (if often hidden under a deluge of affirmations).

My second regret is that I would also have very much liked to have seen more examples of Künzli’s work as a curator. Arguably, documenting his lifelong interest and experiments in showing jewelry would have made this fat book even fatter, but it also would have given future generations an insight into how he has let his work and the work of his students negotiate the third dimension. (I have heard from Künzli that he is interested in producing a book dedicated solely to this aspect of his work at the Akademie, so let us not complain.)

The book was presented to us as a complement to Künzli’s retrospective exhibition at the Pinakotheke. It was referred to as an “accompanying text to the show” by co-curator Dr. Petra Hölscher. I am not convinced that it served that purpose well. While the exhibition certainly would have benefited from more curatorial texts, no one on opening night had a book with them. That definition of the book, I think, only reflects on the exhibition’s particular weakness. The more relevant question, arguably, is whether it does justice to Künzli’s life’s work. The answer to that question very much depends on what you expect from artist monographs, and whether you want them to succumb to the temptation to immortalize their oeuvre or take the risk of letting some of life’s unruly chaos into their printed legacy.

Das Buch does a lot of the former and a bit of the latter. The images, as discussed, are staged to perfection and give little clue of how this challenging work was appropriated by users. (There are very few images documenting how Künzli’s work lives on “real” people outside the (visual) lab. The one notable exception is a mosaic of pictures showing this friend, that collector, or this minister wearing the Gold macht blind bracelet in situations that suddenly feel very real.) The essays also try too hard, in my taste, to establish what I already know—that the “Swiss master” has produced spectacularly good work in the course of his long (and open-ended) career—and this sometimes sugarcoats the real insights that are provided in the essays. (Pravu Mazumdar’s text, in particular, delivers some of the most cogent, and in my eye, pertinent analysis of Künzli’s piece. Look out for his study on the Wolpertinger.) The more succulent nuggets are to be found on the margin of das Buch’s conventional monographic structure. In the detailed index of works (pages 606 to 639) titled “Paralipomenon[1].” These digressive endnotes run like an intimate voiceover to the catalogue, delivered (as always) by the man himself, in which he details some techniques he uses, recounts the encounters that led him to them, and generally puts the passage of time back into the monograph.

This was not meant to be a book review. I was interested in looking at the creative and strategic decision that governed the making of das Buch—how photography was used to translate three-dimensional objects into visual statements and how objects were catalogued and texts built into this definitive OK bible.

Within these parameters, das Buch is traditional to a fault. Valedictory essays written by a select posse of respected craft and art authors provide a solid (or at least varied) bed of words from which volleys of images are launched to plot the chronological evolution of an important artist. This long gallery is capped by a wealth of technical and historical indexes, lists, etc., as one would expect from a retrospective monograph. This is what reference art history books have been looking like for a few decades, and the genre’s simplicity continues to please historians and researchers who prefer it to more hybrid formats[2].

The result is not as engaging as it is thorough. It also shows that Otto Künzli, a keen student of the way value is created, is not immune to the persuasive charm of coffee-table inventories. Like red dots, they are a neat way of saying “this is all mine.”

Sienna Gallery in Lenox, Massachusetts is presenting new work by Myra Mimlitsch-Gray called Something for the Table. Myra has been a professor at State University of New York (SUNY) New Paltz for the past 20 years and a master metalsmith with numerous awards to her credit, including a 2012 United States Artist Fellowship. As the gallery notes explain, “deliberately tentative, this work investigates fracture, explores gesture, and embodies utilitarian notions, suggesting a return to the table.” Myra is articulate and very funny as well as a force to be heard. She is entertaining and challenging at the same time.

Susan Cummins: You are a forceful person and seem to have been born fully formed out of the head of Vulcan, but the baby Myra must have had a journey to get to your position of great silversmith and professor. Can you tell me how that happened?

Myra Mimlitsch-Gray: Wow Susan, that’s quite the lead in! I do have a thing for hammers, and as far as force, well, that’s probably the result of having four older brothers and parents who made physical labor into educational projects—fun for the whole family. In the 70s, we built a house together, and I was assigned the task of straightening nails for reuse. It turned out I was pretty good at it. The baby Myra wanted to be a painter and set out for art school. As it so often happens, the class I wanted was full, so I got stuck in a jewelry class. The bug bit, and that was that.

But really, the crafts were in me at the start. I recall sticking pins into dolls’ ears as a child, and I was a self-taught macramé artist, which resulted in some pretty awful jewelry. Camping trips prompted a fascination with technical planning, problem solving, teamwork, and modes of efficiency that inform my working methods today.

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The archetypal value of jewellery as a magical item, its symbolist core that in Estonia forms the intellectual cornerstone of education, requires quite intimate qualities. There is, however, no point offering the world something they already possess in abundance.

--Professor Kadri Mälk

The forerunner of the present-day Estonian Academy of Arts was the Tallinn Applied Art School of the Estonian Society of Art, founded in 1914.

Estonian Academy of Arts (EAA) is the only institution in Estonia offering education at university level (BA + MA) in the fields of art and design. EAA consists of the faculties of Fine Arts, Design, Media Arts, Architecture and Conservation as well as the Institute of Art History.

Since 1999, EAA has been taking part in the European Union educational programs Socrates/Erasmus and Leonardo da Vinci.

We have signed bilateral agreements for cooperation with many universities in several countries across Europe and America (e.g., Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and USA).

What you can find here?

* Aesthetic utopia, eternal dimension as a spiritual quality.

* Intuition, looking for hidden treasures.

* Responsibility, demandingness, devotion.

* Respect for material, handicraft ethics.

* Warm atmosphere in department. The ones who had opportunity to experience it said that it feels like a family circle.

Programme

Main feature of the curricula is a combination of traditional skills and contemporary thought.

Chairs of jewellery and blacksmithing have a joint Bachelor's curriculum, but within its frames a separate admission of students and an immediate specialization either in the field of jewellery or blacksmithing takes place. In addition to specific speciality-focused study (jewellery project, technology courses, history of the design), the curriculum of jewellery and blacksmithing includes also artist's project with an aim of evoking creative impulses in students and promoting one's individuality under instruction of acknowledged artists. The program includes also general art subjects: drawing, plastic anatomy, painting, sculpture, color study and humanities. As the department belongs in the Faculty of Design, its students can acquire skills and knowledge related to product design, business and product management. However, in the curriculum of jewellery the main emphasis is laid on creative projects, on the concentration on sacral and ritual meaning of jewellery and aim of the school to contrast with pragmatism.

Practices and master classes serve to deepen the professional technological skills. An extracurricular workshop, supervised by an international visiting artist, takes place every semester, plus lectures of visiting teachers.

35 internationally acclaimed artists have taughed at our department in last 10 years: Bettina Speckner, Karl Fritsch, Manuel Vilhena, Peter de Wit, Ted Noten, Ramon Puig Cuyas, Giovanni Corvaja, Noam Ben-Jacov, Paul Derrez, Peter Skubic, Manfred Bischoff, Robert Baines, Cristina Filipe, Iris Eichenberg and many others.

The  Staff

Kadri Mälk – Professor / Head of Department

Tanel Veenre – Assosciate Professor of jewellery line

Piret Hirv – Associate Professor of jewellery line

Heigo Jelle – Associate Professor of blacksmithing line

Rait Siska – Associate Professor of blacksmithing line

Eve Margus-Villems – Assistant of the  Head of Department

The 2013 conference of the Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) was held in Toronto, Canada, in May and was organized by Paul McClure of George Brown College and Melanie Egan of the Harbourfront Centre. The conference was a gathering of mainly North American professional jewelers, academics, and students. The activities included lectures, short PechaKucha-like presentations, interviews, exhibitions, a trunk show, educational dialogue, portfolio reviews, demonstrations, a vendor room, and finally a party. It was a packed agenda, trying to serve a variety of different ages, styles, and kinds of jewelers. Each year, the conference is organized in a different city and by a different set of organizers. How effective is this model? Should jewelers or academics without prior experience in conference organization be expected come up with the necessary knowledge to plan one?

The overriding concept behind the conference program went unexplained until Damian Skinner gave an overview of it in his introduction. He suggested that the title “Meta-Mosaic” was an appropriate choice given the location and the topic of the conference. Canada, he explained, refers to itself as a mosaic of diversity (rather than a melting pot), and the program was meant to address the very real diversity in the field of jewelry. This ambitious goal and the noble attempt to give all jewelers their due raises interesting questions about the meeting itself. Whom is SNAG serving with this conference? Why do the participants come? What are they expecting?

In this two-part series, AJF will hear the impressions of two different writers. Damian Skinner, former AJF editor and one of the speakers at the SNAG conference opens the series with a blow-by-blow overview of the talks. Then, Melissa Cameron, an Australian jeweler and first time contributor, takes on the very haunting question of skill, ever present during SNAG conferences. She interviews a number of makers to understand how they articulate their relationship to skill and how this conference program preempted some of their answers.

The theme for the 2013 Society of North American Goldsmiths’ (SNAG) conference was “Meta-Mosaic,” a phrase that draws on the important role that “mosaic” has played in Canadian articulations of national identity. The idea of a mosaic stands in contrast to the melting pot, which is favored across the border in the United States, as mosaic represents the notion of different elements linked into a whole while maintaining their distinct character. As Paul McClure and Melanie Egan suggest in the conference brochure and in their opening address, this is the character of Toronto, a city transformed by immigration in which more than half of the population was born outside Canada, and it inspired the conference theme, which was intended to explore the diversity and shared histories of metalsmithing and jewelry in the twenty-first century.

Ditching the idea of a keynote address, this year’s conference began and finished with PechaKucha- format Rapid Fire Presentations, in which each of the speakers had the opportunity to present and speak to 20 images that changed every 20 seconds. Established makers were up first, with Michael Belmore, Arthur Hash, Barbara Heinrich, and John Rais representing what the conference organizers referred to as the “Creative and Skilled” sector of the jewelry world—artists, designers, craftspeople, and makers. Emerging makers wrapped things up at the end of the conference, with Suzanne Carlsen, Erica Meier, Eric Petersen, Amelia Toelke, Erin Wahed, and Janis Kerman offering a range of perspectives and positions as they spoke about their work and practices.

I found both of these sessions really suggestive, not so much because of the work itself, but because of the different ways these individuals framed what they do—the terms they used to describe themselves (for example, in the first session I heard “I make stuff’,” “maker, designer, metalsmith,” “goldsmith, maker, studio production maker,” and “blacksmith, designer in metal”), and how they positioned themselves in relation to fields such as art, craft, and design. This was probably best developed in the final session, in which everyone was making jewelry (i.e., objects designed to be worn on the body), and engaging with jewelry forms, such as the ring, necklace, or brooch. You could observe fascinating differences between those who were contemporary jewelers, those who were somewhere between art and craft, and those who were designers. Do you speak about what your objects mean? Check the art box. Do you speak about your practice and skills and materials? Check the craft box. Do you talk about the logo, the look, the client? Check the design box. Of course, it was more complex than this, more nuanced than I’m reporting it here, which is what made it so interesting. If the point of this conference was to experience the diversity of contemporary approaches to jewelry and metalsmithing, then these sessions were a mother lode of suggestive information for the observant viewer.

It wasn’t always clear to me precisely why some of the speakers at this conference were featured in the program, and I think the lack of any kind of introduction beyond the name of the speaker was a missed opportunity to make sure the theme was more than just a cunning name for a jewelry conference in Canada. For example, Diane Charbonneau’s talk “State of Affairs: Modern and Contemporary Jewellery at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts” was a nice introduction to the institution’s engagement with jewelry, a brief history lesson about contemporary jewelry in Quebec, and a chance to become acquainted with the Liliane and David M. Stewart collection of design and craft, which became part of the museum in 2000. But, how did this presentation relate specifically to the conference theme? Why was there no introduction to help locate Charbonneau within the wider program, and thus enable the audience to understand how the organizers saw this presentation within their larger agenda of grappling with the diversity of the jewelry field? This talk was important because it was one of the few moments when we had the opportunity to find out something about Canada and the specific histories of jewelry in this part of the world. That, I think, was one of the missed opportunities of this conference and could have been developed more, as Charbonneau presented a history that offered tantalizing glimpses of stories other than the ones we usually hear. In her narrative of exhibitions at the museum since 1951, the year of the first jewelry show, there were none of the usual makers’ names we know from Europe and North America. It is a pity that this aspect of the mosaic of jewelry in Canada wasn’t showcased a bit more aggressively.

Other talks were also lacking introductions of any kind, but it was easier to articulate how they were contributing to a mosaic with some critical complexity in its representation of the field. Jack Ogden’s ‘Tools and Technology: Gold Working in a Historical Context” made the important point that jewelry manufacture doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and it would be both fair and true to say that most great advances in civilization haven’t been driven by jewelry. Braving and defying the jewelry-centric orientation of his audience, Ogden explored a range of ancient gold objects and how they were made to suggest that we needed to pay attention to wider social and technological contexts if we are going to provide sufficient accounts of jewelry as an artistic activity. As he put it, technology is what separates contemporary makers from those of the past rather than artistic ambitions, and it is access to new technology that steers jewelry history rather than this being an outcome of great masters or human creativity and genius. The average campfire can’t melt the average gold nugget, but if you put gold and copper together, the melting temperature lowers. This is why lots of early gold objects are alloys. Flint tools can’t work gold very successfully whereas metal tools provide more sophisticated options, which is why gold objects become more elaborate with the Bronze and then Iron Ages.

While there was lots here to please jewelry geeks obsessed with techniques (who I imagine are a certain proportion of a SNAG conference audience), Ogden’s presentation was also a demonstration of how to think about jewelry history, the link between technology and objects, and therefore in a subtle way, a commentary about the strategies and frameworks that we use to write the history of jewelry. To my mind, this was a really productive engagement with the conference theme and a good demonstration of what might result if diverse sectors of the jewelry community encounter each other more.

A similar dynamic was present in Peter DiCristofaro’s talk “Make Like the Masters.” He is the director of the Providence Jewelry Museum, which showcases the history of the Rhode Island jewelry industry through its extensive collection of objects, archives, and technologies of jewelry companies that now have mostly gone out of business. Providence was a city of blacksmiths and other skilled craftspeople that provided an infrastructure for the jewelry industry to thrive in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and DiCristofaro, like Ogden, did a great job of steering a path between technical geekery and historical narrative. In the United States, commercial jewelry and studio jewelry are driven by very different issues, partly because commercial production has a much longer history as well as other factors, such as the use of technology, the value given to artistic expression, and the ways in which the wearer/owner is defined by each field. As a result, a history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century jewelry production in Rhode Island doesn’t look the same as a history of studio craft. This presentation connected the audience to a history of jewelry production that raises various issues. It makes us think differently about the kind of histories that jewelers can and should engage with. DiCristofaro spoke a lot about technique and materials but in a way that was totally different to the studio craft discussion. It wasn’t about authenticity or artistic expression, but instead the orientation was toward economics, quick responses to customer demand, cheap variations, and multiples. From the past, we encountered a parallel to the ways in which studio craft is being challenged in the present by design.

Elaine Kim’s talk “Icons of Identity” was, like Charbonneau’s, concerned with presenting the collection and activities of a museum, in this case the World Jewellery Museum in Seoul, South Korea. Opened in 2004, the museum concentrates on traditional jewelry from around the world and has only a modest collection of contemporary or studio jewelry. Kim not only introduced the audience to the museum and its history, but also explored the way in which jewelry is a complicated field with practices that operate very differently and sometimes in tension with each other, which further developed the particular mosaic being created by the conference. The museum tries to show alternative ideas about jewelry in the current moment, particularly by linking traditional jewelry as a system of communication that is based on collective symbolism with contemporary jewelry’s deconstruction of the idea of jewelry itself. While I found Kim’s framework of authenticity to be a problem—such as her idea that objects made for tourist activities stop being significant and become merely decorative—I think this was another interesting prompt for the audience to consider what we might gain if we look beyond the typical practices and histories of studio craft, or commercial jewelry, or design, or whatever framework we might be most aligned with.

Because the other presentations were talks, a change of pace was provided by the conversation between Charles Lewton-Brain, who described himself as a “fine craft artist,” with “one foot in art land, one foot in industry land,” and Alan C. Elder, a curator of Canadian craft and design at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa, Ontario. This was really nice because the conversation roamed across diverse aspects of Lewton-Brain’s career, providing an opportunity to experience the way a particular individual in the field has put together a practice, and how that practice is affected by wider factors, such as audiences, other generations of makers, institutions, other related fields, and various conversations unfolding in different ways at different periods in the past three decades. Lewton-Brain established the website Ganoksin in order to dissolve the bounds of secrecy in the field of metalsmithing and to present knowledge against the tendency to hide and protect what you know from others. He made a very interesting point about how things have changed, suggesting it has been 20 years since the international design world has accepted craft objects and about 15 years since the need for multiples has disappeared in design. As a result, craft can be engaged through a design framework—a theme that, in different ways, appeared and reappeared throughout the conference. As Lewton-Brain concluded, technological possibilities are blurring how things are done, and craft needs to engage with these trends. As digital technologies allow for “mashing”—the remixing of objects—how will the field respond to this challenge concerning originality, ownership, innovation, and the other core values of the discussion around studio craft?

SNAG conferences are an unwieldy beast, suturing together parts of the jewelry and craft fields that probably don’t make easy bedmates. It is what makes them very strange and quite interesting. I’ve attended two conferences now, and I still can’t easily understand precisely whom they are for and how the diverse expectations of the audience can be met. This aspect of SNAG played perfectly into the 2013 conference in Toronto because the stated theme was to explore exactly what happens when this kind of diversity is not disavowed but celebrated. If there was a missed opportunity here, I’d say it was around the unwillingness of the organizers to be more explicit about the tensions and differences, to articulate how we are not the same so that we could process it and be challenged through the need to confront difference. It seems to me that the alert attendee at “Meta-Mosaic” had a good opportunity to experience difference. But without the flashes of tension and struggle that are as much part of Toronto as the unity in diversity, the conference audience was also somewhat let off the hook, and maybe not challenged to really consider what it means to be part of a field in which we all serve very different masters.                 

Helen Britton has been very busy in the past couple of years, preparing an exhibit at the Neues Museum in Nürnberg, Germany, collaborating at FORM in Perth, Australia, preparing for gallery shows, writing for AJF, and so forth. How she also had time to pull together this show for Galerie Rob Koudijs in Amsterdam I will never know. Helen is a whirlwind. She is also one of the most professional and thoughtful artists working.

Susan Cummins: Helen, can you explain Heterogene as the title of your current show at Galerie Rob Koudijs?

Helen Britton: Heterogene is really from the word heterogeneous and refers to the diverse preoccupations in my work. The exhibition at Galerie Rob Koudijs includes, more or less, five different sections, one quite unrelated to another. There are the Dekorationswut pieces; a new drawing sequence that is autonomous but related to the Dekorationswut theme; a selection of the Industrial works, including what I am calling the New Industrial Gardens; as well as two major archival brooches. Then, there is The Big Ear, and of course a presentation of the Jewellery for T-Shirts project with Justine McKnight. It’s a pretty diverse show, and the first time I have presented so many different groups together. I usually have solo exhibitions where I just show one body of related work.

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Galerie Spektrum in Munich, Germany, is showing the well-known jeweler and professor Ramón Puig Cuyàs from Barcelona, Spain. Ramón and his students have been an active part of the jewelry scene for many years, so it is a wonderful opportunity to hear more about his background and reasons for making.

Susan Cummins: Ramon, please tell us the story of how you became a jeweler?

Ramón Puig Cuyàs: I think I’ve always been a lucky person. When I was young, I had three ideas of what I wanted to be when I grew up—devote myself to science, in particular, biology or astronomy, or like my father, who was a ship captain in the merchant marines, I wanted to be a sailor and travel to exotic lands. The third option was art. It’s a bit hard to explain why I decided against the first two options, and I have already discussed this at length in previous interviews. I feel I could have become almost any type of artist except a musician. I had no clue what jewelry was or any interest in it. My grandmother was an opera singer, my uncle was a cartoonist and illustrator, and I’ve always liked to draw and to build things with my hands. I’ve always been very curious about the world around me, and I try to understand how it works, to discover new horizons, and to always see a bit beyond the obvious.

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Linda MacNeil makes jewelry using glass and metal, which gives her amazing control. By using glass and creating jewelry, she crosses over the material lines and appeals to both glass and jewelry collectors. Well established and collected by many museums, Linda joined with Mobilia Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to concentrate on Brooches, the title of her new show. The variety of style, color, and form is pretty remarkable.

Susan Cummins: Please give us some idea of how you became the unusual combination of a glassblowing jeweler.

Linda MacNeil: To clarify, I don’t do any glassblowing. I work with glass in various ways to create specific parts and shapes and colors or to make solid masses of stock, which I can cut and grind to fit the metal parts of a specific piece.

I was experimenting with acrylics in 1972–73 when I met Dan Dailey, who showed me that glass can be an artist’s medium. Glass has diverse optical properties, an infinite range of colors, it can be similar to gemstones, similar to opaque minerals, similar to metal, yet it is unique. Glass is both ancient and contemporary.

Why do you make jewelry using glass?

Linda MacNeil: I have control over the color, the texture, and the quality of light falling on or passing through or refracting within my work. It is also completely my own, unlike a purchased gem or a custom stone.

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This year’s Society of North American Goldsmiths’ (SNAG) conference “Meta-Mosaic“ was held in May in Toronto, Canada. It was co-chaired by Paul McClure of George Brown College and Melanie Egan of the Harbourfront Centre, an “innovative not-for-profit cultural organization that creates events and activities of excellence.”[i] The Harbourfront Centre boasts a metals studio in its own craft department hosting “six to seven full-time artists-in-residence”[ii] and runs a program of beginner and intermediate jewelry courses. George Brown College, a Toronto-based tertiary training facility prides themselves on preparing “workplace-ready graduates,”[iii] and as such, their jewelry course, a part of their School of Fashion Studies, offers “Jewelry programs [that] prepare you to work in the fine jewelry industry.”[iv] With the focus of the conference shaped by these organizers and organizations, it was an interesting year to go into the conference with an investigation topic already mapped—namely, how do the conference attendees articulate their relationship with skill?

The Playing Field

 The responses I received to my question varied, but all were arrayed along a fairly well defined spectrum. One end was an argument for a level of material knowledge and technical skill so high that these, and not an overarching design or concept, defined the output of the maker. This stance was best exemplified by a presentation on day two in the conversation between well-known Canadian maker and teacher Charles Lewton-Brain and Alan C. Elder. The artisan that came through this question and answer discussion was one clearly committed to material investigations, one for whom the process of metalsmithing is prized as both the means of conceiving and creating works.

Michael Belmore, another local artist, neatly encapsulated the other end of the spectrum in his presentation. He was the first to speak in the PechaKucha-style, midcareer artist talks. Dispensing with all but the sparest introduction, Belmore launched straight into a chronological presentation and examination of some recent works. He spoke conceptually and thematically about his finished pieces, and the ideas he was expressing through them. In some cases, he even touched on their life cycle and the audience reactions they garnered as well as on the intended or unintended consequences of their installation on a site or in a gallery. He mentioned his processes in passing, and in a perfectly aimed nod to his audience, made a joke about his large-format chasing work, saying that he resorted to repoussé only when he made a mistake, wryly undercutting the undeniably high level of skill displayed in his works. After this introduction (and despite some makers even claiming the contrary during their presentations) the dominance of craft terminology in the subsequent presentations was immediately noticeable. Process, materiality, and the studio were highlighted and conceptual content was often only given a glance.  

It was clear from his presentation that Belmore learned and leveraged skills in service to his conceptual intent. In conversations with him after the conference, I sought further insight into his perceptions of the significance of skill within his practice, in which he stated that, “Skill is important. When things are done well, they seem effortless to the eye. Skill offers the easiest and possibly the best way to speak to the viewer … Skill is about capturing your voice in the object so that it can be shared easily.”[v] His materials and processes are planned in detail, as “they all have meaning, and they all talk to whatever issue I wish to imbue the object with.”[vi]

Freedom through Skill, Freedom from Skill

At this conference, my conversations with other artists, jewelers, object makers, and designers evinced a multiplicity of responses to the question of each maker’s relation with skill. Most of these conversations naturally veered toward matters of process and materiality, thus highlighting their importance to practitioners. This tendency illustrated the pervasiveness of craft thought amongst those in attendance.

The general consensus amongst my interviewees was that a base level of metalsmithing knowledge and skill is deemed necessary to create jewelry work. When noting to artist and writer Jillian Moore that this bias toward metals expertise came up time and again in my conversations, she said that “Some kind of expertise is what we are all interested in, and we have a traditional idea of what that expertise should be. There is a traditional model for training that kind of expertise that a lot of people work in.” When starting out, she mentioned that she found these traditional skills seductive, as it is easy to dazzle, to amaze, and to create wonder, and to produce a certain sense of opulence through the works so produced. For her practice now, however, she says “I’m interested in a different kind of wonder, so I take the patience that came with the traditional skillset and try to apply it to different things that give me the results that I want.”[vii]

For many of the artisans that I spoke to, the underlying assumption was that this level of skill is important in order to know how or when to acquire more skills. Then beyond that, there was often a higher expectation, where being well versed in a diverse range of skills was particularly prized. To summarize the words of educator and metalsmith Sean Macmillan, conceptual content is lent more legitimacy through skillful execution, when an artist understands the rules that they are breaking. In the same vein, Brian Ferrell likened metalsmithing to jazz, in that performers need to have a great understanding and skill in order to take their works in different directions.”[viii]

There were fewer mentions of conceptual skills during my conversations, with the word “skill” conjuring mostly responses related to the physical realm. Yet, strengths in developing ideas were encouraged in Linda Savineau’s case by teacher Daniel von Weinberger at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Berchem, Antwerp, who espoused thinking without knowledge of the behaviors of material. As she recounted, he preferred students to work in forms and ideas that did not limit what was going to be made or how it might be realized. She also noted that he was not fond of having too many tools. She recounted how, at the time, she lamented the lack of techniques that she was being exposed to, but now knows that this focus honed her conceptual skills.[ix]

Interestingly, much of the work Savineau wore and all of the pieces she shared through the traditional SNAG first night pin swap were 3D printed. As a second-career artist, Savineau mentioned that she did not grow up with computers, but “is now pretty comfortable with them,” and that she had been introduced to 3D printing through SNAG conference attendance. She noted that part of the blessing of knowing, yet not having complete mastery of, this tool is that she enjoys the surprises she gets from the process. She acknowledges that with her limitations in computing skills, she is often party to accidental creative happenings, ones that would not have occurred if the process were completely in her control.[x]

Many makers made a case for the opposite, however, arguing for complete mastery of the skills used in their practice. Diane Reilly said this “allows you to express yourself fluidly with the material.” Reilly was also quick to point out that “skill and material aptitude allow you to be more fluid,”[xi] and to be “uninhibited by process.”[xii] A loss of inhibition in an effort to engage the subconscious, creative brain is understandably highly prized. In essence, that speaks to requiring a very high skill level, so as to cause the least amount of friction against burgeoning ideas.

And Skill Begat Skill

In the same conversation, Brian Ferrell, who began in metals but also creates furniture as well as being an educator, contributed that the “process of metalsmithing is so tangible … it allows you to explore new materials without prior knowledge.”[xiii] This idea, brought up time and again in my conversations, implies that owning a specific skill brings with it an implicit understanding of the limits and benefits of that skill in that material, and by proxy, a general understanding of similar processes in other materials. In effect, it begets a depth of understanding that can be engaged when cultivating skills in another arenas or when designing away from the workshop. It is a concept singled out by Juhani Pallasmaa in his book The Thinking Hand: “Mastering one craft helps the designer and architect to grasp the nuances of other crafts.”[xiv] This craft transference is seen as another important benefit of having what was often, and rather nebulously, described as ‘a base level of skill’.

In our conversation, Grace Hilliard-Koshinsky explained that while she had developed a repertoire of material knowledge, her intention for each piece she makes dictates the materials to be used and skills to be learned in order to create that work. In the course of developing new objects, she traces diverse ideas and thus works with diverse materials, and so at each turn she takes up the techniques required to resolve each as they dictate.

Hilliard-Koshinsky acknowledged that at the moment she is “pursuing steel,”[xv] and while she took pains to point out that she does not fit ideas to steel, she now “thinks” in steel owing to her creative immersion. In her view, having developed a mastery over this material—with it she is able to create hollow forms through the inflation techniques developed by mentor Elizabeth Brim—she now believes that she understands the implications of working in that material in a technical sense, according to its working materiality and more specifically why it works the way that is does.

This comment on the implications of steel precipitated further discussion on the wider ramifications of Hilliard-Koshinsky’s chosen material, and connected with a story from my past that involved experiencing how the massive iron ore trains in Port Hedland, Western Australia, have shaped that town geographically. This digression cast a new light on our use of the word “materiality.” The assumption that materiality and the implications of certain materials refers to their technical aspects and not to their historical nor cultural connotations seems to have been implied by the discussion of skill, as this was the only time this aspect of materiality came up in my discussions. It is possible that the word “skill” itself is loaded, especially for the group being interviewed, so its use consistently took these conversations in a particular direction.

Hilliard-Koshinsky uses this knowledge to her advantage to “wield it against type,” making realistic reproductions of soft things such as backpacks, duffel bags, and more recently, garments. Having these skills in her hands involves not only knowing how to create the object itself, but also having the skills needed to make the special tools required to fabricate the object. In effect, she leverages what knowledge she already has in order to analyze a problem and synthesize an entirely new solution in the form of a tool that did not exist before,[xvi] which can only be the product of skills she has already acquired. She says that these skills have thus allowed her to “develop a predictive sense, at least some of the time.”[xvii]

Overskill

Katja Toporsky neatly described the non-binary philosophy espoused by many makers, stating that skills are both an important starting point and acquirable on an as-needed basis. “It’s important to have a wide array of skills at your fingertips. It then becomes choice rather than necessity to choose one skill over another.”[xviii] And then, “My work is also very experimental, involving a vast array of materials I had to explore and acquire the skills to work with. Here, skill is more related to knowledge about the material’s properties, its history, and the meaning people associate with it.”[xix]

Tellingly, Toporsky is in agreement with Belmore and Macmillan, in that she, too, recognizes that skill is not an end in itself, but by the same token, “lack of skill is a distraction and diminishes the work, so I do make sure things are executed to a good standard.”[xx] She also admits to finding comfort in working with what she knows, saying “I prefer to employ skills that I feel at ease with—die forming, chasing and repoussé, fabrication—over certain others.”[xxi] But she is also self aware, avoiding the perils of virtuosity for its own sake. “I sometimes choose not to learn a skill to perfection,” says Toporsky.  “For example, I use a lot of molds into which I cast a large variety of materials. While I know how a perfect mold is supposed to be made, I prefer the look of the imperfect. Pure virtuosity without thought plays no role in work, and maybe that’s the place where I veer off the trodden path of craft.”[xxii]

Leaning away from virtuosity for its own sake was also noted in the group conversation that took place between myself and Maria Eife, Brian Ferrell, Jera Rose Petal Lodge, and Sean Macmillan. It turned out to be a watershed moment for me, for it was on this fateful occasion that I learned the expression “technical vomit piece.”[xxiii] This is pretty much as it reads—a piece that uses a lot of difficult techniques purely for the challenge of being able to execute them in concert. The group dismissed such works, noting that when the primary function of a piece becomes to impress other makers—and the consensus was that this was the main function of such works—then the object’s primary (and dubious) claim to fame is to limit its audience to people who would be impressed by such displays. Thus, while the conversation pointed toward the idea that skill is very important, it did include design and conceptual skill. The conclusion was that if the work has no center, no reason for being, it would ultimately be a weaker work than one that has put this skill in service to an interesting idea.

Shorthands and Parochialism

Of course in that conversation, as well in many others I was party to during the conference, the point is that technical skills are present. The unspoken assumption underpinning all of the informal interviews I conducted, as well as many of the presentations I attended, was that in order to be a “good” maker, skills in metalsmithing are of primary importance. And hand-in-hand with that, in order for the work to be good, the technical skills of the maker had to be evident in the work itself in some fashion.

That the conversations I had about skill referred to hand skills and metals training as the basis from which all jewelry and object-making (conceptual or otherwise) arrives, while unsurprising in itself, is more telling in what it reveals about makers, and perhaps the dominant educational paradigm, in North America, and more specifically, what artisans here are comfortable talking about. Inferred by and revealed through these conversations, and aided in the way in which language, and particularly the language of craft, was used during the conference presentations, it is possible to conclude that the practice of making itself is the most important thing that the collective is attempting to communicate about, and not the concepts illustrated or the ideas communicated through it. It would seem that the main concern within the field is not what or why, but how an object is made.

There is dissatisfaction with this being the state of discourse, as evident in my conversation with Maria Eife and Jillian Moore, two artists whose works benefit from a broader definition of skill. Both of these artists acknowledged that excellence in traditional craft skills are of more importance to their sensibility and ethos than they are to the practical day-to-day of their practices. For them, a well-crafted object is still part of the desired outcome. However, because their jewelry uses new materials (laser-cut felt and 3D-printed nylon in the case of Eife and hand-painted layers of resin over polymer or foam in the case of Moore), they are often considered the outliers in what I have come to understand is a metal-skills-focused field in the US. Eife also suggested the lack of visible trace of her hand in her work somehow makes her practice less acceptable in certain circles. This perception sometimes changes, however, when people find out about her metalsmithing education. Both artists would like to see a shift in focus from technique or materiality toward greater acknowledgment of conceptual skill, as it is in concept that Eife and Moore wish to define their works. They have made specific skill and material choices, yes, but they have been made very deliberately in service to the ideas that they are trying to convey through their works.

Having been in discussion with students about their works at the conference, Moore called into question the thematic shorthand that has crept into American craft through a desire or need to engage in (while perhaps not acquiring the skills to develop) a suitable conceptual dialogue around their output. In this shorthand, the use of certain materials and processes are tied to specific thematic associations, making it easy to append a meaning to the result of specific skill or material engagement in a work. An example is using a patina and automatically aligning the outcome with a dialogue about aging and decay. Moore laments that the dialogue around art jewelry will be limited to well-hashed territory, while makers continue to claim that their works are about something that “still reflects back to a process”[xxiv] rather than being driven by a broader and more self-aware discussion about the maker’s intent. Acceptance of shorthand themes as a reasonable conceptual discussion does not challenge the maker to wholeheartedly participate in the discussion. It is then easy to see how, in turn, this results in a lack of makers who are equally confident in their technical and conceptual skills, since their technical decisions are the only ones discussed (albeit through a pre-established thematic overlay.)

The Weaker Skills?

Yet, I found some discontent from the opposite direction, from those who feel that at the furthest reaches, conceptual jewelry has lost the connection with making skill, which if properly harnessed, would have the potential to make such works more powerful. This is a compelling argument, yet it conceals a willingness to dismiss the importance of developing conceptual skills at all, a prejudice which may have its roots in the skepticism of the idea that there is equal worth in conceptual and technical skills. When correlating the “wearable, stable, permanent”[xxv] jewelry with the other “temporary, open ended, changeable, ephemeral, a work-in-process”[xxvi] investigations, the technical skill level in this nonmaterial work (produced by fewer idea-driven makers) is found wanting, regardless of conceptual intent or quality. As Liesbeth den Besten also admits of this work in her book On Jewellery, “These character traits do not make it very easy to appreciate this work” and so these artists “breach the borders of their trade, yet at the same time, their work is rooted in their craft, its history, usage, codes, conventions, and bigotry.”[xxvii] The fact that they don’t engage with their craft skill is not true—sometimes, a judicious use of conceptual skill makes it necessary to exhibit its technical opposite—it is just that they choose to engage with it by not exhibiting only it.

Finally, despite the conference coordinators’ roles as educators of market-ready jewelers and craft-consumers, their efforts as curators did not result in any references to presentation and selling skills in my conversations. This was in evidence especially from the Canadian contingent of the early career artists who took to the stage on day three of the conference. There was significant reference to addressing the market in the presentation by Eric Peterson and to the importance of presentation to the collaborative works between Erin Wahed and Janis Kerman in their Bande des Quatres jewelry line. The dialogue that evolved around skill could, and perhaps should, have been more equally spread between all of the skills required to maintain a successful jewelry practice. Presumably, these skills include commercial (such as administration, communication, or brief fulfillment), conceptual, design, historical, making, (into which I incorporate technique and material manipulation abilities), professional, and research. Yet, it was making, and to a lesser extent conceptual skills, that dominated my interviews and conversations.

That making and conceptual skills butt up against one another so often in an either/or position rather than a more inclusive and/both position is revealing, as it seems that makers are set up (or being set up) to favor technical over conceptual skill. Perhaps the bias of the organizers was evident in the presentations and so did affect the dialogue that surrounded this year’s event. If that is true, whomever the SNAG conference organizers choose to shine a spotlight on is privileged to set more than just the agenda in their own presentation. Then again, perhaps it’s the opposite scenario— when choosing each maker to profile, the organizers are staying loyal to the heritage of their organization and the tastes of those perceived as the traditional attendees. Either way, for those in attendance at SNAG this year, the ownership of craft skill was considered noble, thus the speakers, presentations, and resultant dialogue seemed destined to reflect that fact.

Heidi Lowe Gallery is located in the beach town of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and has an active program of exhibitions and classes taught by the owner Heidi. In July, Jessica Stephens, a recent graduate from State University of New York (SUNY) New Paltz was the featured jeweler. I think Jessica’s answer to my first question is very telling. Why aren’t students being asked to consider the wearer? Has education swung too far in the direction of self-expression that the wearer isn’t considered in academia? After all, the wearer provides both the end site and the reasons for making jewelry in the first place. I was grateful for Jessica to bring this up in her interview. She is an articulate maker and someone to watch in the future.

Susan Cummins: Jessica, you have been out of school now for about five years. Since graduating from SUNY New Paltz, have your ideas about making jewelry changed?

Jessica Stephens: I definitely think more about wearability. I think about the viewer’s and the wearer’s perception and if the pieces are accessible to a broader audience. In graduate school, you are gifted with an educated audience, a group of people who are intense and invested in the same manner as you. Once you leave that world, you realize how different the value system of the general public is, especially with regards to jewelry, craftsmanship, and invention.

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Velvet da Vinci, located in San Francisco, California, USA, is a gallery for contemporary art jewelry and metalwork. The gallery organizes 10 to 12 exhibitions per year, showcasing artists from the US, Europe, Latin America, and Japan. In this interview, Elizabeth Shypertt answers questions posed by Missy Graff.

Missy Graff: What is your background with contemporary art jewelry? What led you to be a dealer?

Elizabeth Shypertt: I studied jewelry making starting in high school and continued with night classes when I returned to San Francisco after college.  Mike Holmes studied jewelry and metal arts at the California College of Arts. Mike and I met in a class, and after some time, we decided to open a store to show our work and the work of friends.

Can you please explain how your gallery came to be located in San Francisco, California, and how you chose your particular location in that city?

Elizabeth Shypertt: Mike and I live in San Francisco, so it was the logical place to open a business. We started the gallery in Hayes Valley behind the Symphony Hall, which at the time was a run-down area with promise and has since become very trendy. At that time, most of the storefronts on Hayes were vacant, and we looked for the smallest and cheapest space on the sunny side of the street. After 13 years, our rent was going up to $6000 per month, so we moved to our current Polk Street location in a terrific old furniture factory on Russian Hill.

Can you describe your gallery space? Do you find it necessary to present the jewelry in a variety of ways outside of a display case?

Elizabeth Shypertt: The gallery is large, roomy, with lots of good, natural light. Because of the size of the gallery space and the amount of foot traffic, most of the jewelry is displayed in cases or under vitrines. Running a gallery in a city means that security is always a concern, but we understand that people need to have the jewelry in their hands and on their bodies, so we make a point of taking work out as much as possible. We have special exhibitions every five or six weeks that are shown at the rear of the gallery. With ample storage for pedestals and cases upstairs, we can change the look of the gallery with every show. We have a 25-foot (7.62 m) atrium with a skylight at the top where we can feature site-specific installations of jewelry or sculpture. Artists love to work off of that fantastic space.

Velvet da Vinci often works with outside curators to plan exhibitions. Can you explain why?

Elizabeth Shypertt: Actually, we curate or initiate most of our exhibitions, but we also love to work with outside curators because of the opportunity to showcase a different point of view. Frequently, we will commission a curator, give him or her an idea, and see where they take it. I think these collaborative projects produce interesting results. Earlier this year, our Ferrous show was organized with Brigitte Martin of crafthaus and was a great success. Our upcoming La Frontera exhibition is about the border between the US and Mexico. We curated it with Lorena Lazard of Mexico City because we felt it important to have a Mexican voice in this very political show. I think Velvet da Vinci is unusual in that we also work with other craft institutions to help fund some of our exhibitions. Over the years, we have partnered with the British Crafts Council, The Mondriaan Fund, The Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston, Society of North American Goldsmiths,Victoria and Albert Museum, and most recently the Museo Franz Mayer.

Your exhibitions often have catalogues that accompany them. Does the gallery fund all of these? What are the benefits of producing catalogues?

Elizabeth Shypertt: Yes, we generally fund the catalogues. Though this is a big financial commitment, we try to produce catalogues because we feel it still is the best way to have a permanent record of an exhibition. A catalogue can be a very good advertising tool. We also have an enormous archive of past exhibitions on the Velvet da Vinci website. We understand our role as a resource for the field and have always tried to have a large online presence for our shows.

Can you describe your traveling exhibitions? Do you also have a core of jewelers you consistently represent? Are they mostly American?

Elizabeth Shypertt: I wish we could travel more of our exhibitions, but it gets expensive even when the other venues pay for shipping costs. But mostly, the logistics of touring shows are too time consuming. Sometimes the nature of an exhibition demands that it be toured, such as our Anti-War Medal exhibition about the Iraq war. It toured for four years with new pieces added in each country where it was displayed and eventually included 200 pieces from 16 countries. We hope that La Frontera will tour to venues along the border, and we are working on making that happen right now.

We do have a core of about 60 to 70 jewelers who we represent full time.  About one-third of the jewelers are from the San Francisco Bay area, one-third are from the rest of the US, and one-third are international.

Given your experience with artists from around the world, what are the main differences you see in the work from culture to culture, if any?

Elizabeth Shypertt: Good work is good work. And although I think that there can be a European sensibility in much contemporary jewelry, it would be hard to pin down where something is made. I think a lot of US work still employs traditional metalsmithing techniques and uses precious materials. Because our audience is pretty broad in terms of familiarity with art jewelry, we show work that is very approachable as well as the most cutting-edge pieces that push the boundaries of materials and wearability.

Many jewelers have shifted toward using nontraditional materials and incorporating found objects into their work. How do you explain the value of this type of work to those who are not familiar with contemporary art jewelry?

Elizabeth Shypertt: From the beginning, much of the focus of Velvet da Vinci is on educating the public. Fortunately this is less and less necessary, because over the years, customers have become more aware of art jewelry. Many of our customers do understand the workmanship of a piece makes it more valuable regardless of the materials used.

Your gallery represents a lot of skilled craftspeople. How do you feel about artists who reject good craftsmanship in their work?

Elizabeth Shypertt: Except for a few collectors who never intend to wear the work they buy, our customers want to be able to wear their jewelry. I think that there can be an appropriateness of craftsmanship in jewelry. I think an artist such as Jillian Moore shows looseness in her technique but her pieces are still clearly well made. We never want pieces returned to us because they have broken. Clasps are supposed to clasp and pin backs to stay pinned. Obviously things happen, but we try not to show work that is not well made.

 As the field grows and materials shift, do you see a change in the collector?

Elizabeth Shypertt: Many of our collectors have become more daring over the years and have embraced changes in the nature of contemporary jewelry. But many older collectors are not buying as much as they used to, and this has meant we have reached out to a new audience. I think the whole concept of “Collector” has changed, and many of our best customers would hate to be categorized that way. I think our younger customers are looking for new, stimulating experiences, and that could be buying a necklace or going to a nightclub or trying out a new restaurant.

What is your relationship with your collectors like? Do you develop friendships? Do you take them out to dinner a lot?

Elizabeth Shypertt: We have developed wonderful friendships with some of our collectors and do try to share meals with them when they are in town.  Many of our collectors do not live here, so the relationship is long distance, but our shared enthusiasm for jewelry can easily bridge that distance. Jewelry buyers tend to be a fun group, and we enjoy getting together.

 What advice do you have for emerging artists?

Elizabeth Shypertt: Make excellent work!

How can the art jewelry community help support the success of the art jewelry market moving forward?

Elizabeth Shypertt: To both makers and buyers of art jewelry I would say, “Wear jewelry!” I think our challenge always has been to grow the field. There is no point in competing for the business of the same 100 women when there are thousands of other women (and men!) who would love what we do if they only knew we existed.

In order for the art jewelry market to move forward, the community needs to buy work and support us through their purchases and by spreading the word.

Thank you!