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
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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,
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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
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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
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Conceived, according to the author Roberta Bernabei, as a research tool for those interested in contemporary jewelry, this book wears its textbook origins proudly: an introduction, brief conclusion and resource appendix accompany 25 interviews with European jewelers, illustrated by black and white images and a modest color section. Some of the interviews are better than
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As much a work of publishing art as a retrospective of Karl Fritsch’s jewelry, this book is the perfect introduction to the sheer plethora and spectacle of Fritsch’s cunning combination of the most reactionary and most revolutionary elements of contemporary jewelry. The texts, by various luminaries of the contemporary jewelry scene, are not translated into
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While there is no denying the sheer variety of contemporary jewelry on display in this book (color images of 552 pieces of jewelry by 193 artists from fourteen countries) Dona Z Meilach doesn’t do much to lift the book beyond its origins in a call for submissions in which anyone could participate. Grouped by themes,
