Articles

This is the AJF blog’s first look at Heidi Lowe Gallery in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, but we recently featured a profile of Heidi and the gallery in the July AJF newsletter – a members only feature. The gallery’s latest show is called Desire, a theme that many jewelers investigate. I was curious as to who was included and how the idea was handled.

Susan Cummins: AJF featured you and your gallery in the July newsletter so I don’t want to repeat the questions asked, but for the sake of this interview, can you give me a short version of the story of how you decided to run a jewelry gallery?

I have always been drawn to the museum/gallery sector of the art world.  As an undergrad I worked at the Baxter Gallery at Maine College of Art. The director, Jennifer Gross, was a great mentor and she allowed me to participate in all aspects of the gallery. At SUNY I realized how few places the public has to experience art jewelry. Opening a gallery was a way to realize a dream of mine and contribute to the field in general. After grad school I moved to New York City to work at Leo Koenig Inc., a contemporary art gallery in the heart of Chelsea. This experience helped me to understand the logistics of running a gallery, but did not provide a model that I could see myself owning. It was not until I visited Dunedin in New Zealand that I found a gallery that spoke to me. The gallery, Lure, was run by artists, showed many artists’ work and provided a fun and inviting space for the public to interact with art jewelry. This solidified my vision and I opened the gallery three months after returning from New Zealand.

Ulysses Dietz It is always cruel to ask a curator to pinpoint his or her favorite object. I have 40,000 things under my stewardship, ranging from the late 1400s to the present day and while some of them I frankly don’t care if I ever see again, there are many I love to the point

Sara Morgan I have been asked to do the impossible about the jewelry I collect: write about the one that got away, or write about my favorite piece. I could tell you about some of my favorite former pieces that got away because I decided to stick them in my suitcase at the last minute

Rose Watban is the Senior Curator of Applied Art and Design at the National Museums Scotland. She is responsible for European glass, jewelry and contemporary craft. Just at this very moment the museum is featuring a jewelry exhibition called A Sense of Place: New Jewellery from Northern Lands, which includes sixteen jewelers from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Scotland. I asked Rose to contribute to our ongoing series called Curator’s Choice and to tell us about how she decided on her favorite piece.

My favorite piece of jewelry

Giovanni Corvaja, Wendy Ramshaw, Gijs Bakker, David Watkins, Fritz Maierhofer, Jan Yager and Kevin Coates are just a few of the important makers represented in National Museums Scotland’s jewelry collection. This amazing collection was mainly acquired by Dr Elizabeth Goring, a colleague and good friend and to whom I am grateful for her generously given help and advice when I began curating the collection.

I thought long and hard about which piece I should choose. There were many candidates and a great many reasons attached to the contenders but in the end, surprisingly, my favorite piece is not one of the seminal works acquired by Liz but a brooch by Lucy Sarneel. I first saw Lucy’s work at Collect, the London Art fair, in 2007 where she was being shown at Galerie Marzee and was I was stuck by both the simplicity of her work and the exquisite craftsmanship. Although I had previously made acquisitions for the collection, I had always discussed them with Liz and how they fitted in with the existing works and our collecting policy. This time I was alone and although I had a gut feeling that Lucy’s work should be in the collection I’m afraid to say that I didn’t have the faith in my own judgment to make a decision and so did not make a purchase.