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Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection
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On view Sunday, September 30, 2007 - Sunday, January 27, 2008 at the Audrey Jones Beck Building
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Organization of Exhibition
The exhibition is organized as a continuum so that viewers can observe relationships between artists (particularly those of teacher and student) and geographic regions, the dialogue between jewelry and major artistic movements of the 20th century, as well as how various aspects of the field grew in opposition or in response to others.
The show begins with a chronological overview featuring key works from the 1960s to the present. Within this section, virtuosity, technical innovation, and the introduction of alternative materials in jewelry are discussed. One of the significant messages of the exhibition is that important jewelry does not have to be made of precious materials. Over the last 30 years, artists worldwide have been creating dynamic jewelry out of alternative materials such as plastic, paper, Corian, wood, Color Core, and fiber. Leading innovators such Claus Bury, Hermann Junger, Reinhold Reiling, Gijs Bakker, Stanley Lechtzin, Albert Paley, Eleanor Moty, Sharon Church, Jamie Bennett, Edward de Large, Arline Fisch, Thomas Gentille, Robert Baines, Yasuki Hiramatsu, Max Fröhlich, Falko Marx, and Robert Smit are featured in this section. Process is addressed through the use of artist sketchbooks and drawings by Claus Bury, Peter Chang, Georg Dobler, Manfred Bischoff, Hermann Jünger, Gerd Rothmann, Margaret West, Carlier Makigawa, Wendy Ramshaw, and David Watkins.
The exhibition continues by examining three themes in depth: narrative impulses, the influence of 20th-century art movements on contemporary jewelry, and the role of the body and performance jewelry.
Narrative Jewelry: Whether depicting personal stories, myths, politics, history, or popular culture, narrative works engage the viewer by transporting them to a particular time or place and by encouraging imagination, interaction, and fantasy. Often these objects are ghettoized because of their content—it sometimes overwhelms technique and structure—or are marginalized because of their figurative imagery. Through the work of American artists such as Laurie Hall, Ron Ho, Betsy King, Robin Kranitzky and Kim Overstreet, Richard Mawdsley, Bruce Metcalf, Joyce Scott, Don Tompkins, Merrily Tompkins, J. Fred Woell and Nancy Worden, as well as Europeans such as Manfred Bischoff, Ramon Puig Cuyas, Bernhard Schobinger, Robert Smit, and Esther Knobel and Australian artists such as Pierre Cavalan and Sieglinde Karl, this vital aspect of the field will be celebrated.
The Influence of 20th-Century Art Movements: For many contemporary jewelers, their work is a combination of concept, process, and material. Jewelry artists have been vital participants in larger artistic communities since ancient times and many have been intimately involved with painting or sculpture either through their own practice or through close relationships. Many artists in the Drutt collection have chosen to use tenets of major art movements such as the Bauhaus, assemblage and collage, Constructivism, Minimalism and Conceptualism, sometimes decades after the movement first appeared. In more recent years, as the lines have further blurred the boundaries of the art world, jewelers, painters, photographers, and sculptors are mining source material simultaneously. Pieces by Gijs Bakker, Emmy van Leersum, Giampaolo Babetto, Friedrich Knupper, Gary Griffin, Georg Dobler and Otto Künzli and others are featured in this section.
The Body and "Performance Jewelry": In the 1970s, the Dutch jewelry artists Emmy van Leersum and Gijs Bakker staged a series of "happenings" at the Stedelijk Museum where they created one of the earliest manifestations of "Performance Jewelry." Described by Lam de Wolf as "the process of stripping bare the protective clothing of ritual adornment to unleash our sense of play and psychic revelry," these objects are often linked to a specific ritual, place or movement. Through the work of artists such as Gijs Bakker, Caroline Broadhead, Eugene and Hiroko Sato Pijanowski, Marjorie Schick, Janna Syvänoja, and Lam de Wolf the synergy between jewelry and the body, regardless of scale or artistic influence is discussed.
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The 32nd Annual Ruth K. Shartle Symposium
On Contemporary Jewelry
Keynote Address: A Conversation between
Helen W. Drutt English, Collector and Educator; and
Peter C. Marzio, Director, MFAH
Friday, September 28, 6:00 p.m.
Symposisum
Saturday, September 29, 1:00—6:00 p.m.
Presenters: Cindi Strauss, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Decorative Arts and Design, the MFAH, and organizing curator of the exhibition Ornament As Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry in the Helen Williams Drutt Collection; Glenn Adamson, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Grace Cochrane, Independent Curator and Writer, Sydney; and Sharon Church, The University of the Arts, Philadelphia
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After leaving the MFAH, the exhibition will go to the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, March 14-July 6, 2008; the Mint Museum of Craft + Design, Charlotte, North Carolina, August 16, 2008-January 9, 2009; and the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Washington, June 20-September 13, 2009.
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