November 2014

Susan and Jeff Wise collaborate not only as man and wife, but to make jewelry together. The couple is known for cutting their own sculptural gemstones and integrating them into bold designs—their work has been collected by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of Art and Design in New York. On the occasion of their show, An Exhibition of Modern Jewelry, at Patina Gallery, I had the chance to ask them a few questions.

Olivia Shih: This is your first gallery exhibition in two years. Did you take a hiatus from gallery exhibitions, or does it take this long to prepare for a show? Why exhibit now?

Susan and Jeff Wise: We show in galleries on a regular basis, but this is an unusually large collection for us, and it’s especially exciting to have it featured in a gallery as beautifully curated as Patina. We have a very long history with Santa Fe—in Jeff’s case, going back to his teens in the 60s, when the family would take road trips from their home in Denver in a 1948 Chrysler Town & Country Woodie. In those days, there were lots of highly skilled Navajo and Pueblo silversmiths selling their work under the portico of the governor’s palace, where Jeff bought turquoise heishi beads.     

We currently are able to produce around 60 pieces a year, and we’ll have around 80 pieces at Patina, so this show represents a significant amount of bench time. Many of the pieces had been put aside as our own retrospective collection, and we don’t normally show them or offer them for sale—but together, Allison and Ivan (Patina’s owners) can be most persuasive. Anything for art. The idea for this show started when Allison came up to Durango and stayed with us while she judged awards for a show at the Durango Art Center, which Susan and I had done the initial jurying for.

Benedikt Fischer is an Austrian jeweler who attended the technical School for Arts and Craft in Steyr, Austria, before taking a leap into art jewelry at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, where he studied under Manon van Kouswijk and Suska Mackert. After Rietveld, he worked as a professor’s assistant at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle, Germany. Fischer is known for his idiosyncratic pairing of traditional metal engraving with brightly colored plastic in highly original forms. His work is currently on exhibit at Jewelers’Werk. He is also one of five finalists for the 2014 Art Jewelry Forum Artist Award.

Olivia Shih: Could you talk about your time at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie? How has it influenced the way you think or work?

Benedikt Fischer: Before I came to study at the Rietveld, I only had a technical background, so I was not really familiar with the concept of so-called art jewelry. I felt comfortable there from the very first day, although it was of course not always easy, especially in the beginning. I think I came at the right time—there were really inspiring people, and the teachers, Manon van Kouswijk and Suska Mackert, were wonderful. They put a lot of thought into the program and showed us their love for the field and interesting ways of working. In short, it was perfect. The Rietveld is a powerhouse for ideas and creativity.