This is just a small selection of the book reviews we’ve published. Check out the full list by clicking here. Clicking on any text colored red will take you to a review of that book. The Power of the Narrative in the 2020s A review by Davira S. Taragin of Jewelry Stories: Highlights from the Collection […]
Seven Books About Art Jewelry Read More »
Jennifer Cross Gans was a freelance writer and a collector of jewelry, and a generous supporter of the arts in many different ways. She lived in the City of Fog and died of old age. Gans described how her jewelry collecting began: “It was a summer afternoon in 1973, and my son, then two-and-a-half, was
Jennifer Cross Gans, 1932–2022 Read More »
Benjamin Lignel in his office, Montreuil, 2016, photo: Cosima Lignel At the end of 2016, Ben Lignel, AJF’s editor for the past four years, will be leaving us. He has had a great run, and we will miss him. Before he goes, I wanted to get his insights and thoughts about what has happened in
This Is Where I Am. Read More »
What the hell is “reporting on contemporary practice” about? Who’s reporting on contemporary craft or contemporary jewelry, and what, exactly, is their goal? It turns out that there are a number of online and print platforms that promote, discuss, and critically report on the field of contemporary jewelry, and that we had a chance to
The Content Providers Meeting Read More »
My studio is in my home. I live upstairs and I work downstairs. I share my home with more than 500 dead, dried insects as well as my dog, Pumba. I am very happy that I have a cuddly happy living animal amongst all my dead ones. Sometimes I have spiders crawling in my workspace,
Marta Mattsson, Stockholm, Sweden Read More »
This is my workshop, I have a lot of materials for my jewelry that are always placed so I can see them easily. I find if materials are out of eyesight, I won’t use them. I’ve moved workshops quite a lot and I find with every move the organization of materials gets more orderly as I group
Lisa Walker, Wellington, New Zealand Read More »
Tanel Veenre, Handful. Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2015. ISBN: 978-3-89790-436-1 Book cover: Handful, Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2015, photo: Benjamin Lignel. It must be brave for an artist to author a book about their work. Writing seems ancillary to the core occupation of producing work. The act might appear self-congratulatory, unfair on the reader who cannot access, touch, much
This is part of my studio in Fitzroy, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne. It has natural light and looks out on a large ghost gum tree that changes color when the weather changes. The studio is also the front space of my house and, to be fair, my working space extends very often to the kitchen table
Manon van Kouswijk, Melbourne, Australia Read More »
In May of 2015, AJF Executive Director Rebekah Frank went out to Minneapolis to attend the very exciting Superscript seminar organized by Mn Artists and hosted by the Walker Art Center (the rest of us attended the seminar through its live feed). The seminar was of interest to AJF for several reasons. Not only was
Have Pen, Will Report? Read More »
My Mum gave me Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual for Christmas 2011. Since then, the big wedge of paper has undergone material transformation, something Perec pays particular attention to within the book’s numerous and nebulous narratives. Tiny bits of torn paper bookmark pages that I have to return to; the thinly glued spine is
This Summer I Am Going to Re-read… Read More »
Reading is seasonal. Come June, we head down the nearest Amazon shop—well, you know what I mean—to buy what your downstairs neighbor calls a “summer read” while wrapping a bashful smile around the latest Le Carré, which happens to be poking out of his beach tote. Meanwhile AJF, being of the WTF persuasion, believes that
This summer, I am going to re-read… Read More »
A large part of the extended AJF team (Rebekah Frank and Ben Lignel) and board (Susan Cummins, Liesbeth den Besten, Bella Neyman, and Tanel Veerne) has just dispersed back home from Munich Jewelry Week 2015. This year’s crop of exhibitions did not disappoint, and delivered to the crowd of aficionados the usual mix of sensory
