March 2015

Zip It! How One Necklace Silenced Twitter

Each award-show season, a virtual community of jewelry enthusiasts gathers around hash tags to observe and assess red-carpet arrivals in real time. Using a predetermined tag—#oscarjewelry #globejewelry #grammyjewelry—lets us comment, question, commiserate, and crack wise on the jewelry selected to adorn celebrities at these rarified events. Considerable intrigue surrounds who will wear what. Calling a …

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Commode-ity Boom

Modern alchemists and broke jewelry students, your prayers have been answered. Gone are the days of sweeping metal filings from a dirty studio floor or transmuting lead in a candlelit laboratory. Gold and other precious metals are as close as the nearest toilet, just waiting to be sifted from human excrement. According to recent findings, …

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Winfried Krüger

Winfried Krüger is showing his most recent work at Galerie Marzee after receiving the Marzee Prize four years ago. This prize also allowed him to produce a monograph with Arnoldsche documenting his progress as a progressive jeweler for the past 50 years. He is an important jeweler and it is wonderful to have this beautiful …

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Outer Limits curated by Madeline Courtney

In this interview, curator Madeline Courtney discusses her concept for the exhibition Outer Limits, which was recently presented at Facèré Jewelry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington. Outer Limits showcased work by Jana Brevick, David Choi, Rebecca Hannon, Arthur Hash, Shayna Illingworth, Tia Kramer, emiko oye, Rachelle Thiewes, and Myung Urso. Missy Graff: Outer Limits usually …

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Neanderthals Make Case for Jewelry’s Relevance

To the left, cave painting. New research shows that 80,000 years before supposedly sophisticated Homo sapiens began thinking they were so cool with their eight-legged bison paintings, Neanderthals wrestled giant eagles out of the sky to collect their talons for jewelry-making. Scientists believe eagle claws manipulated for ornamental wear clearly demonstrate that Neanderthals were capable …

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Ruudt Peters’s Summer Studio, Ravenstein, The Netherlands

During the summer I worked on a new project in my summer studio. Blind. The Russian philosopher George Gurdjieff said that all good art needs two components of the following three elements: the head, the heart, and the belly. Personally I think that chaos and the unconscious are more creative than the things we already know. …

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Happy New Year!

A large part of the extended AJF team (Rebekah Frank and Ben Lignel) and board (Susan Cummins, Liesbeth den Besten, Bella Neyman, and Tanel Veerne) has just dispersed back home from Munich Jewelry Week 2015. This year’s crop of exhibitions did not disappoint, and delivered to the crowd of aficionados the usual mix of sensory …

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The Absent and the Given

Suska Mackert enjoys the dubious privilege of being considered a standard-bearer of conceptual jewelry. Performative, installational, fragmentary, her work regularly uses absence as a strategy and reproduction as a tool. The archives it uses as source material and the “works” that repurpose them into installations, posters, or editions form the bulk of her last solo …

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Karin Seufert: KGB

Karin Seufert, no title, 2010, necklace, plastic, silver, press-button, 230 x 15 mm, photo: artist Olivia Shih: How did you find your way to jewelry? Karin Seufert: As a young girl, I was fascinated by jewelry, something I could adorn myself with, something that would make me beautiful and attract attention. I quickly started making …

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