Based on Helen Drutt’s comprehensive collection of contemporary jewelry (now in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts) this book is a strong introduction to the history and practice of contemporary jewelry. Peter Dormer writes the critical chapters, which are intelligent and historically minded, offering insights into the issues that individual jewelers tackle in their work, as well as some of the larger issues that are at the core of contemporary jewelry itself. A solid bibliography, chronology and artist biographies are, like the color photographs of the jewelry, worthy additions. While this book has been superseded by Cindi Strauss’s magisterial Ornament as Art (2007) as a record of the Drutt collection, Jewelry of Our Time remains a valuable introduction to the field, as well as being an important document in the historiography of contemporary jewelry itself.
