Damian Skinner, ed., Marzee. Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2026. “Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in you; it is you who lives in them.” —Walter Benjamin This sober, light-blue volume, with its cloth-bound spine, could be described as a comprehensive book on the history of […]
Note: During the installation of Lori Talcott: Jewels for the Underworld in New York City’s SoHo, the writer of this review held multiple conversations with the artist. Talcott’s quotes below are pulled from those discussions. Lori Talcott: Jewels for the Underworld, 2025 November 21–23, 2025 New York City Jewelry Week, New York Presented by Sienna Patti
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Melanie Grant, ed., The Jewelry Book. London: Phaidon, 2025. I’m not immune to the allure of stones and precious metals, but I prefer studio jewelry and unconventional adornment. Nonetheless, I found Melanie Grant’s The Jewelry Book, which focuses heavily on high-end baubles, engrossing and enchanting. The book’s 300 jewelry-focused entries feature glorious examples of craftsmanship
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Helen Molesworth, Precious: The History and Mystery of Gems Across Time. New York: Ballantine Books, 2024. Helen Molesworth’s Precious: The History and Mystery of Gems Across Time isn’t just a book about gemstones. It’s a journey of human desire, power, culture, and history told through 10 gemstones. It shows how our ambitions for power, love,
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Constellations: Contemporary Jewelry at the Dallas Museum of Art November 9, 2025–May 3, 2026 Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, US What is a review, and what exactly does it judge? Is it the selection of works, the logic that holds them together, or the values a field assigns to itself at a given moment?
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The Jewelry of Dorothea Prühl September 6, 2025–January 3, 2027 The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX, US Dorothea Prühl is one of the great jewelry artists of our day. And through January 3, 2027, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is featuring Prühl’s work in a small but impressive show. Most of the
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Bette Barnett, Creating Steel Jewelry: Etching, Fusing, Keum Boo, Enameling, Stainless and More. Watchung, NJ: Artisan Ideas, 2024. At a time where cookbooks double as memoirs and influencer memoirs are lifestyle sales pitches, it’s nice to review a book that is exactly what it is. Bette Barnett’s Creating Steel Jewelry is an informative textbook about
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Arnoldsche published Bizarre Beauty, a book about William Harper, last year. AJF timed the release of this review of it to coincide with and celebrate an unrelated exhibition, Precious Grotesqueries: The Jewels of William Harper. That show will run October 23–December 12, 2025, at Les Enluminures.[1] Glenn Adamson and Martha J. Fleischman (eds.), Bizarre Beauty:
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Paint: Rachelle Thiewes El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX, US May 30–September 21, 2025 Rachelle Thiewes’s new show, Paint, is something of a blockbuster. Thiewes has established a distinguished career over many years. Her several bodies of work surely merit a retrospective. This show, however, is comprised entirely of recent work. A whole
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The Fascination of Jewellery: 7000 Years of Jewellery Art at the MAKK New permanent exhibition Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln, Cologne, Germany A man at a display case is laughing out loud. There’s no one else around. I probably look puzzled, so he points at a bangle made of a curtain rail and moonstones. His
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This substantive, educational, and enjoyable exhibition celebrates an innovative maker renowned for his technical and aesthetic contributions to studio jewelry Curated by Rebecca Elliot, it issued from the Mint Museum’s acquisition of a large amount of Ebendorf’s jewelry from the collectors Ron Porter and Joe Price, as well as the Robert W. Ebendorf Archive The
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1984 May 20–July 27, 2024 Galeria Zé dos Bois, Lisbon, Portugal This summer, the second Lisbon International Biennial of Contemporary Jewellery celebrated 50 years of democracy in Portugal, focusing on freedom, power, and democracy. The official program presented Teresa Milheiro’s solo show, 1984, at the Zé dos Bois (ZDB) gallery. This exhibition served as a rebellion, reflecting on how
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