Interviews

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.

Caroline van Hoek in Brussels, Belgium, has had her gallery for five years. The storefront she occupies was once a grocery store and the original awning still refers to Fruit and Legumes. She has participated in a number of high profile fairs like Design Miami and has tried to expose art jewelry to new audiences. Her show in April 2012 with Ulrich Reithofer, an Austrian living in Amsterdam, presented a full and rich range of his latest work. Ulrich took a while to get back to me with answers to my questions and apologized with a song by F R David called ‘Words Don’t come Easy.’I think you will find that his words might not come easy but they are pretty damn poetic.

Susan Cummins: Please tell me where you went to school and where you are now.

Ulrich Reithofer: I was in a technical college for civil engineering in Austria during the 1990s and in 1998 I entered Fachhochschule Trier, Fachbereich Idar- Oberstein in Germany where I learned gemstone cutting and jewelry design with Theo Smeets. That was followed by two years at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam getting a Master of Applied Arts with Marjan Unger. I am now living and working in Amsterdam.

Patina Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is owned and run by Ivan and Allison Barnett, an energetic and engaging couple. They chose to have a show called Overlay with Steve Ford and David Forlano through April 22, 2012, during the time of David Forlano’s painting exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art. Ford and Forlano are popular artists on the craft fair scene and innovative makers using polymer clay. But beyond that they have very active creative lives, as you will see.

Susan Cummins: I understand that you and Steve Ford met in Rome during a year of studying abroad through the Tyler School of Art. Can you retell the story of your meeting and explain why you became friends and working partners?

Steve Ford: David and I were assigned adjacent studio spaces at Tyler/Rome in 1984 and had similar work habits. We both liked to work until the building closed at midnight. We’d then walk back to our pensione, stopping at Giolliti’s near the Pantheon for a late night gelato. While our individual styles were very different, I think we were both intrigued by the other’s thinking about art and how to make a successful painting. Our first collaboration was in a figure drawing class there. Working next to each other, our two drawings of the same model had opposite problems. We spontaneously traded drawings and ‘corrected’ each other’s work.

David Forlano: I remember being interested in the way Steve thought about painting. We had studios directly next to each other, which allowed for constant dialogue about the process of making work. I was intrigued by Steve’s focus on the construction of paintings as an object.

Galerie Pont & Plas, located in Ghent, Belgium, is housed in a beautiful old eighteenth century house. Nicole Thienpont founded the gallery in 2002 and shows a variety of artwork, including jewelry. She says she was inspired by the words of Dr Adriaan Claerhout, ‘Is there a purer, more honest meeting point imaginable between cultures and people than art?’ Her show with jeweler Gesine Hackenberg opened on a drizzly night in early March 2012 and will continue through April. I was curious about Hackenberg’s work and her decision to use contemporary glassware imagery.

Susan Cummins: Can you describe your background as a jeweler?

Gesine Hackenberg: I was born in 1972 in Germany but now I live and work in Amsterdam. I was trained as a goldsmith at the Fachhochschule für Gestaltung in Pforzheim, Germany and in 2001 I received my degree from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. I am currently a Visiting Professor at the MAD-faculty in Hasselt, Belgium and at the VakschoolEdelsmeden in Amsterdam.

Was there a particular teacher or artist that influenced you?

I guess Iris Eichenberg, who was one of my teachers at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, has influenced me most in my way of working and looking at materials. Though I believe that also my background as a goldsmith in Germany has always stayed with me.

How would you describe your work in general?

A basic theme in my work is placing ordinary objects of use in the perspective of jewelry. I reflect their emotional value and possible position on the body. The pieces are based on craft techniques and various materials that tell their own stories about preciousness and adornment, like ceramic tableware, (precious) metal, Japanese Urushi lacquer and glassware. They refer to the validity of traditional themes and their heritage. In the same time, they merge concepts like jewelry, ornaments and objects of use.