In March 2015, Art Jewelry Forum released Shows and Tales—On Jewelry Exhibition-Making. The challenge of showing contemporary jewelry has given rise to a bubbling exhibition landscape, with amateurs and professionals playing musical chairs to a very D.I.Y. score. Artists mount exhibitions in their bedrooms. Museums invite amateurs to curate shows from their collections, and visitors to handle work. Collectors issue exhibition lists and detailed press releases. Students wearing jewelry parade the streets in white overalls. In short, ever since contemporary jewelry became self-aware in the 60s, jewelry exhibition-makers have ceaselessly experimented with new formats to present ornaments.
Given how extremely busy these—often self-proclaimed—curators have been over the last 60 years, it is surprising that the variety of their approaches is so rarely acknowledged, or taken seriously, as is the extent to which curation transforms our perception: There has never been, thus far, a publication on exhibition-making with jewelry as its focal point.
Shows and Tales aims to remedy this absence, and features a series of commissioned articles on landmark exhibitions, ranging from MoMA’s Modern Handmade Jewelry (1946) to last year’s crop of street-bound jewelry parades; commissioned essays by, and discussions with, curators on the challenges of curating jewelry; select exhibition reviews from Art Jewelry Forum’s archives that track some recent experimentation with display strategies; and a detailed checklist of all the exhibitions discussed in the book.
After sharing with you Lizzie Atkins’s essay called Parades, we are happy to now give you Jorunn Veiteberg’s essay on exhibitions that let visitors touch—and handle—objects: She tracks, using a few key examples, the history of “not touching,” explains why this traditional model is losing steam … and tells us about the challenges and opportunities offered by more interactive formats.
Call for entries
We were well aware, publishing Shows and Tales, that a number of influential shows were missing from it, and we are already working on publishing a second volume. A few of our supporters have pointed out some shows that, in their minds, deserve to be looked at and brought into the public eye again. We value their opinion, but we also want to hear from the wider jewelry community. Here are two questions:
• In your opinion, which three exhibitions redefined the way jewelry is exhibited and had a lasting impact on the field itself?
• What do you think are important components of a good exhibition?
Please take a minute to think about them, and send your answers to editor(at)artjewelryforum.org.
INDEX IMAGE: Images of visitors wearing objects from Touching Warms the Art, 2008, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, Oregon, photo: Photo Booth and visitors