Opening night at SOFA NY The Park Avenue Armory is much as the name suggests: a building completed in 1881 for the Seventh Regiment of the National Guard. SOFA NY (April 14-17, 2011) is held in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, a huge space of about 200 by 300 feet with a barrel-vaulted roof spanned […]
Notes from SOFA NY 2011 Read More »
Victoire de Castellane, Quo Caïnus Magic Disco, 2010, Lacquered silver, white gold, diamonds, and smoky quartz, Bracelet: 3 3/8” x 3 3/8” With base: 5 7/8” x 5”. Photo courtesy Gagosian Gallery & Victoire de Castellane The display is bare enough. Four whitewashed tables occupy, but do not crowd, Gagosian’s second floor ‘project space.’ Two
Victoire de Castellane: Fleurs d’Excès Read More »
Chile is a land of earthquakes, but it isn’t just a case of the earth moving. In November 2010, the tectonic plates of the emerging scene of contemporary Chilean jewelry moved to unexpected places in this part of the globe. The catalyst? Ruudt Peters came to openly share his particular way of understanding contemporary jewelry, the
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On a terrible winter day in New York City, with snow piled up on sidewalks and narrow paths cutting through canyons of grey slushy muck, I made my way to the Museum of Arts and Design. On view was the exhibition Think Again: New Latin American Jewelry. With over 50 Latin American jewelry artists contributing almost
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Hoping to get some idea of the ramifications of fine art’s turn to the handmade, I started reading By Hand: The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art, edited by Shu Hung and Joseph Magliaro. As the editors write in their preface:
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Kambui Olujimi, Untitled from The Blackout Collection, 2010-11, mixed media, photo: Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco Each sculpture, a hybrid of equal part necklace and handcuff, hang on the wall throughout the gallery. The show is tidy, with each piece staying closely within a simple format. But within that format variations arise allowing for an
Kambui Olujimi: Love to Lose Read More »
Conferences stimulate the development of critical discourse in the craft world. In the United States, the American Craft Council, the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, the Society of North American Goldsmiths all organize craft-specific gatherings that fuel ideas and provide face-to-face networking. Craft is a small fish in a big pond at
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The second book by English publishers Black Dog to take stock of contemporary jewelry practice in the new millennium. The geographical spread is not too bad and the jewelry itself is nicely introduced with short texts (by Beccy and Indigo Clark) and a judicious use of object-only and contextual photography. Amy Sackville’s introduction sets the
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The first of two books by Black Dog which survey contemporary jewelry in the new millennium, this publication sets the scene by introducing contemporary jewelry as a practice which tests the limits of jewelry through a substantial flirtation with fine art. It’s a somewhat boring premise, but it does accurately describe what a lot of
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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,
Jewelry of Our Time: Art, Ornament and Obsession Read More »
This book is not only a good introduction to the work of a number of important contemporary jewelers, but also attempts to develop a kind of history of contemporary jewelry that is still relatively rare. In detailing a face-off between the United States and Europe (Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy) Turner does a credible
Jewelry in Europe and America: New Times, New Thinking Read More »
An interesting book that seeks to survey contemporary (or as the authors call it, studio) jewelry in the 1990s and to provide some interpretative frameworks for understanding the practice. The discussions of individual jewelers are somewhat frustrating because of a lack of specifics and a tendency to rely on generalizations, but Amanda Game and Elizabeth
Jewellery Moves: Ornament for the 21st Century Read More »
