Interviews

Fingers Contemporary Jewellery gallery in Auckland, New Zealand, was established in 1973 by a group of young jewelers. It is where the contemporary jewelry scene took shape in that country and the gallery continues to thrive today. Fingers recently joined AJF and we’ve featured the gallery this month in our newsletter, which is a members only feature, but we also wanted to make you aware of Fingers and the artist they are showing right now. I interviewed Alan Preston who was one of the originators of the gallery and Matthew McIntyre-Wilson who is the featured artist this month with a show called Nga Mahanga: The Twins.

Susan Cummins: Is Fingers still a cooperative? How does it work?

Alan Preston: It was always five or six separate businesses operating collectively. One of these is Fingers. We still have five members selling their work through Fingers and we sell around 60+ makers on commission. We employ five people who do the bulk of the work selling and coordinating shows.

What is your role?

Alan Preston: My role is that of a senior partner advising on the phone where necessary and doing the internet banking. Today it was buying the wine for the opening for Matthew McIntyre-Wilson and bidding farewell to Octavia Cook, another jeweler, on Monday.

Patina Gallery, located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a lively and active place. Ivan and Allison Barnett, the owners, are constantly working on how to present their shows in an inspiring environment where their clients can learn about the handmade work they show. This month they are presenting the work of Myung Urso, a Korean artist who has developed a way of working with wire and fabric to make very unique jewelry. After talking to them, I was really impressed with the commitment and creativity they all bring to their chosen lifestyle. See what you think.

Susan Cummins: Ivan and Allison, you are partners in the gallery. Correct? Can you give me some idea about your backgrounds? How did you get into this business?

Last September AJF published a profile on The National in Christchurch, New Zealand, in our newsletter.  I won’t say too much, since you can read the excellent interview, except that the 2011 earthquake in New Zealand destroyed the gallery. Caroline Billing who owns and runs The National has recovered and is still going. She is remarkable and I wanted to see how she was doing. During June she featured New Work: Renee Bevan, who has some very complex and thoughtful things to say about her jewelry. See what you think.

April Higashi is a jeweler who opened a lovely intimate gallery called Shibumi in Berkeley, California, a number of years ago. I know her to be industrious and thoughtful, which is reflected in the work she does as well in how she has structured her life and her gallery. She is lots of fun, a woman of many talents and has a good time making things work in her life. At the moment she is having a show called Geologica by Brigid O’Hanrahan, who works in both porcelain and metal and often combines the two in her jewelry. Her sensitive rings and brooches give you a hint of her shy nature.

Susan Cummins: I know we have worked together in the past, but please refresh my memory about how you got to be the owner of a jewelry gallery.

April Higashi: I’ve been making jewelry for twenty years. Even in the beginning when I was first starting to make jewelry, I always thought about how it would be shown, grouped together or how it could be worn. When I worked at your gallery (Susan Cummins Gallery, Mill Valley, California) you instilled in me the importance of thought, idea and craftsmanship in each piece. While there, I realized how much I enjoyed aesthetically arranging and grouping the work. I also realized during that time how much I liked working directly with clients. So I knew I would enjoy curating a gallery. When my husband and I were looking to buy a house we found a building that was zoned for partial commercial use. The space was large enough to have both a workshop/studio and a gallery on the bottom floor. With this set up I felt I could continue to be a jewelry maker as well as take on a new role as curator and gallery owner. Originally I was thinking I would only do the gallery part-time. The reality, however, is that I have ended up creating two full-time jobs for myself. Fortunately I am a good delegator and so I have also ‘curated’ an amazing creative team to help me.

Amsterdam must have more jewelry galleries per capita than any other place on earth and some of them, like Galerie Louise Smit,  have been around for more than 25 years. This gallery helped to create an audience for contemporary jewelry both locally and internationally. Luckily for us, Monika Zampa has kept the gallery alive as Louise Smit retired. Best wishes to Louise and Robert Smit and may you enjoy the less frantic pace of your retired lives. In the meantime I wanted to know more about what Monika was planning.

Susan Cummins: You are a fairly new owner of a very old gallery. Can you tell us about how the transition took place between you and Louise Smit?

Monika Zampa: In the past I used to work in London as an investment banker, project manager and a deputy director for medium size company. Then I moved to Amsterdam, changed my life and started to study conceptual jewelry at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. In my last years of the studies, I realized that my combination of financial/organizational skills and passion for conceptual jewelry was rather unique. I thought that it could be perfectly applied in running the gallery. I approached Louise and offered my skills and knowledge if she would consider having a business partner. We started to talk, got to know each other and had lots of good times. Our cooperation began in September 2010 with the idea that I would be able to run the gallery on my own by 2011.

AJF is searching the world for galleries, museums, curators, makers and collectors who are passionate or even just interested in art jewelry and want to join our community. In the process we found Putti Art Gallery in Riga, Latvia and asked the owner Agita Putane to answer a few questions about her gallery and her current show with artist Maris Sustins, a Latvian jeweler. Welcome Putti!

Susan Cummins: Congratulations on being AJF’s first Latvian gallery.

Agita Putane: I am excited and happy about it. This is the best birthday present for our gallery. I would like to thank you for this fantastic opportunity. This is a great chance to tell the world that Latvian jewelry designers are highly professional artists and that Riga is home to a fantastic art gallery, PUTTI.

First of all I have to ask why your gallery is called Putti? I know that in renaissance art the ‘putti’ is a little pudgy winged baby. How does that image work for you?

This story dates back to the times when the gallery was located in another place in Old Riga. Its brick wall had been preserved since the seventeenth century. During that period, baroque dominated in art and in architecture. The figure of the angel was used in paintings and in arches. The figure of angel – ‘putto’ – in Italian means ‘a guardian angel.’ ‘PUTTI’ in Italian means ‘guardian angels’ (plural). They are protecting us and we feel it all the time. For our logo we used a font from the baroque period.

Sienna Gallery located in Lenox, Massachusetts, is owned and run by Sienna Patti, a youngish and ambitious dealer. She grew up in a family atmosphere filled with the ethos of the American craft community and started her business while still in her teens. Sienna is a member of the AJF board and an active member of the international jewelry community. She featured Lola Brooks that the SOFA New York 2012 fair. The show, called charted territories, was installed using furniture and objects taken directly from Lola’s personal holdings. The display added a lot of information about the pieces and about Lola herself, who kindly agreed to answer my questions.

Susan Cummins: Where did you study? Did you have a mentor there?

Lola Brooks: I studied with Myra MImlitsch-Gray and James Bennett at SUNY New Paltz, where I got my BFA. It was inspiring to work with two professors who were as engaged in their pedagogical pursuits as they were in their careers as prolific artists. They were both incredibly influential in shaping me into the artist I am today, sometimes similarly and sometimes in very different ways. I was so fortunate to get to work with James as his assistant for a number of years, cutting my teeth on his gold and learning the finer points of composition among a million other things. We had an incredible working relationship. His material irreverence left its fingerprints all over me and my work, manifesting itself in my flagrant disregard for – and obsession with – conventional notions of preciousness and craftsmanship.

Atty Tantivit opened ATTA Gallery in Bangkok a year and a half ago. After acquiring an MA degree in Marine Biology, Atty took one of those detours to jewelry that led her to Europe and eventually to opening her gallery. She says, ‘I wanted to open a gallery in Thailand as I would like to share with other people the kind of jewelry that I fell in love with. If I can fall in love with it, I am sure there will be other people who will as well and I just have to give them opportunity to see more of it. Also I had some artist friends in Thailand who had no platform to showcase their works. Having a gallery opened the  door for them as well. We have some well-known artists who made it big abroad but are nobody at home. I think this needs to change.’ So how is she doing? ‘I like to think that the first year was the time that ATTA Gallery learned how to crawl and how to stand up. Now we are walking slowly but steadily. I hope that next year we will be running!’ During the month of May 2012, Atta Gallery is showing the work of Austrian artist Bernhard Stimpfl-Abele.  He has a unique way of working as he explains in this interview.

Susan Cummins: What is your background? Where are you from? Where did you attend school? Where do you live now?

Bernhard Stimpfl-Abele: I am a goldsmith and jewelry artist with a master’s degree from the Konstfack University in Stockholm, Sweden. I live between Italy and Sweden and I was born in Austria.

Françoise Vanderauwera opened Vander A Contemporary Art Jewellery in November 2011 in Brussels, Belgium. She is young and energetic and comes at jewelry from a design perspective and it will be interesting to watch the course she charts in the coming years. Her current show is Jewels Stories by Delphine Joly. It is a very curious and unique collection of jewelry – qualities that also apply to Delphine herself.

Susan Cummins: You are really new on the scene. Can you give me some background what lead you to decide to open a jewelry gallery?

Françoise Vanderauwera: Yes, I am very new on the scene. I knew four years ago that I wanted to open a gallery to show much more of these wonderful artworks to a wider public. The starting point for me was design. I grew up using cutlery by the architect-designer Arne Jacobsen, which my father, who was also an architect, received personally from him. A few years ago, when a Brussels design shop I used to visit closed I began looking for contemporary creators and was amazed by how many high profile gold- and silversmiths, object designers and new jewelers I could recognize. I learned and traveled a lot and now the gallery is up and running.

Mobilia Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was established in 1978 by Libby and Joanne Cooper, a sister team. Since then, this dynamic duo has been featuring high quality decorative arts, sculpture, paintings and studio jewelry. Rachelle Thiewes has been showing with Mobilia since 1994 and this is her second solo show. Rachelle is a professor at UTEP and an articulate and unique maker. I was delighted by her responses to my questions. If you are interested in seeing more of her work you can purchase a recent publication about a collaborative project she recently completed.

Susan Cummins: What is your background and how did you come to be interested in art jewelry?

 Rachelle Thiewes: I grew up in a family that made things. My parents built our first house, kitchen cupboards and all, my mother designed and made most of my clothing (and hers) she made white feather Christmas trees in the 1950s (pre Target) and sold them in Dayton’s department stores, we invented, crafted and made most everything it seems. My mother felt quite strongly that everyday us kids needed to spend significant time playing and creating. The one TV was pretty much off limits except for Disney on Sunday night. It was a rich childhood.

In many ways I was destined to become a jeweler. My father was a hand engraver, freelancing for many jewelry stores, including Tiffany. I spent countless hours in the studio watching him engrave and often accompanied him to our local jewelry stores when delivering work. I have two older brothers that are artists so it seemed natural that I too would study art. I had no idea that ‘metals’ was an art subject until I saw the first student show at Western Illinois University. I was fascinated by the possibilities of the medium and quickly changed over my major from sculpture to metals.

This month Jewelers’Werk Galerie in Washington DC is showing the work of Iris Boedmer, the German jeweler from Pforzheim. Ellen Reiben has been in the jewelry business a long time. She has had the gallery since 1988 when she took it over from the founder, Dutch jeweler Joke van Ommen. I asked both Ellen and Iris some questions about the gallery and the fabulous work being shown.

Susan Cummins: Ellen, how do you describe what you show?

Ellen Reiben: I show contemporary international jewelry by artists, in a range of materials. What is most important to me is a sense of a clear and original vision that does not feel derivative in concept or implementation. The work must speak of its time (I am not fond of the term ‘timeless’) and I am also very attracted to subtlety. Having been in this field for a long time and having seen so much work, it is still inspiring to me to find new work that is truly provocative and powerful and seems to speak its own ‘language.’ My intuition plays a role in selection – an intuition that has grown and that I now trust, from so many years in this field.

What is your background and what led you to run a gallery showing art jewelry?

Ellen Reiben: I have an MFA in jewelry from Rochester Institute of Technology and I studied with Gary Griffin. My work was mostly in non-precious materials. I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin and studied with Fred Fenster. Since then I have done a broad array of exhibition design, theatre props and my own jewelry. Now, however, I focus on my gallery and my daughter, who is fifteen. The gallery was called V O Galerie in 1984 when Joke van Ommen opened it. She was killed in an automobile accident in 1988 and her family asked me to take over. At the time I had my work in her gallery. I changed the name of the gallery for legal reasons and carried on with her goals of bringing international artist jewelers’ work to the United States.