Podcasts about american jewelry

What you'll learn in this episode: Why Native American jewelry has struck a chord with Australian shoppers Why jewelry is so important to Native American cultures, and the history of jewelry making in the Southwest Which characteristics to look for in distinct varieties of turquoise How to make the most of a trip to Indian Market Which Native American jewelry artists are ones to watch About Jennifer Cullen Jennifer Cullen is the owner of Four Winds Gallery, a jewelry gallery in Double Bay, Australia that focuses on jewelry of the American Southwest. Established in 1981, Four Winds boasts a collector's standard of traditional and contemporary North American Indian jewelry, pottery, sculptures, graphics and textiles. The gallery is the culmination of a long-term interest and passion for Jennifer.  Photos available on TheJewelryJourney.com Additional Resources: Website Instagram Facebook Transcript: Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the second part of a two-part episode. If you haven't heard part one, please go to TheJewelryJourney.com. Today, my guest is Jennifer Cullen of Four Winds Gallery, an unusual jewelry gallery located in Double Bay, Australia. Welcome back.    What about coral? You have the reefs there, and there's a lot of coral in Indian work, but I hear it's becoming very hard to find now.   Jennifer: We have no coral in Australia to work with. It's protected, and we have a lot of trouble with—what is it? The crown-of-thorns starfish. They're doing a lot about coral beds on the northeast coast of Australia, with all that big, beautiful coral. They're doing a lot to maintain that at the moment. All the coal that has been historically worked into North American Indian jewelry was traded in by the Spanish originally, so it's all Mediterranean coral. The earliest coral strands in the 1800s were drilled and rolled strands of beads that they would wear around the neck with cotton sinew or twill, or whatever was strung through the center of it. And there were webs of coral. They would wear ropes of heishi done in clamshell. Later on, as they got better equipment, there was turquoise heishi and jet heishi. Heishi is the traditional word for a handmade, small bead.    Originally the coral was traded. The Native American groups loved the color. They had previously found their ability with color by working with the spiny oyster shell that comes out of the Gulf of Mexico. The spiny oyster shell comes in colors from reds similar to coral into purple and intense orange, like an Hermès orange. It's a beautiful color. I actually have a lot in my jewelry because I love it. I sell a lot of it here, and I wear a lot of it. I love the orange. I've always had a passion for these oranges and reds and purples. People in the Southwest embraced it pretty rapidly and started to incorporate it into their jewelry findings and body adornment. So, in the 1800s, it was works of coral predominantly.    Then they started to learn how to work silver. That didn't start until about 1868. Prior to 1868, there was very little in silver. They actually started by heating up copper and brass cooking utensils. They were soft materials that were exposed to them by the soldiers and the Spanish and the Mexicans, and they'd make it into jewelry findings and body adornment. Then they discovered silver, which is found in the Southwest of the USA, and they started to make that into metal findings to house the stones. That was the process.    When chatting at length with another one of my mentors, Lori Phillips, she used to talk to me a lot about the development of American Indian jewelry, history and development. She was a big dealer and collected from Pasadena in California back in the day. I was very close friends with her. Anyway, she taught me a lot. They started setting coral into silver vessels and housings and cabinets in about the early 1950s. There wasn't a lot of coral set into jewelry, other than strands or ropes of coral beads, prior to 1952. So, finding the odd piece of jewelry that did have a bit of coral in it is a very unusual thing.    Generally, most of the coral still comes from the Mediterranean. It's traded in now by different dealers. It's become very expensive and sought after because they're protecting the coral beds in Italy. It's getting harder and harder to get it.    Sharon: It's harder, yeah.   Jennifer: Yeah, but it's not Australian coral at all.   Sharon: You're so knowledgeable. Do you put on educational seminars besides flying in artists?   Jennifer: We used to write articles here in Sidney for the Antiques and Art Galleries Magazine every quarter. There were some pages of photographs and examples of things. Probably about seven years ago, when the paper folded and everything went digital, that's when we ended up with the New South Wales Art and Antiques Magazine. Maybe it went down into Victoria as well and Melbourne south of us, which is not a big town, but it's a cultural center. So, I used to write articles. I have been meaning to put together all those articles I wrote for so many years and so many editions of the Antiques and Art Galleries Paper in New South Wales and compile them into a book. That's on the to-do list. I haven't gotten around to doing that yet.   I used to do talks occasionally at clubs or different places where women would want to be spoken to about wearable body adornment. I did some radio interviews with Dan Kotch back in the day. He's a finance and investment guy who does radio interviews with people to talk about things that are considered good investments, that hold their value and appreciate over time, which jewelry does. Up in the Blue Mountains I did some talks. I was invited to talk to groups of artists that lived up in the mountains who did various forms of artwork. They wanted to hear about American Indian art in general, the textiles, the jewelry, the pottery making, how it was done. I've also done interviews with a local radio station here. They invited me to do a few talks on their Sunday afternoon program about jewelry. So, I've done a fair bit.    I've done fashion magazines, Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and different things. I've done photoshoots of my jewelry over the years, where they've wanted to show unusual artwork. They often use it in their fashion shoots. They borrow jewelry and put it in their fashion shoots and give credit to the gallery, but then they'll ask me to write some information about the gallery and what's it all about, and then they'll put that into the magazine. Women of Individual Style was a thing that came out one time, and I was asked to be a part of that one issue. They talked about me and how I dressed and all the body adornment I wore and how I put it together. So, over 40 years, there have been quite a lot of things I've been asked to do. I haven't actually written a book and I haven't organized a group of talks. I probably could, but running a business, having staff, trading pearls, going on buying trips, organizing four exhibitions a year, it's a lot. You do the best with the bulls that are the most important for you.   Sharon: No, I understand. You have a lot of time left to do that.    I've never been in the Indian Market. I've always wanted to go, but I've been scared off by the crowds.    Jennifer: It is hectic. It is very hectic.   Sharon: Yes. You say when you come back, you have a buying exhibition?   Jennifer: Sure. I'm over there, often Instagramming things I'm finding and putting it on Instagram just to show people things I'm finding while I'm away. Then, when I get back, I have to ship everything home to Sidney and we go through it. We take a nice photograph of it, like a postcard, and I send it out. I have some 5,000 people on my mailing list. So, I send all my clients a huge postcard of beautiful jewelry. I'll have an odd, old carving in there or something to make it look beautiful. I send it out and say, “Hi, that's my latest buying trip. We'll be having a champagne opening”—it's usually the second week of September on a Saturday—“Please come see the collection, or you can view a lot of it online or you can email me.” My clients look forward to that because they're not all traveling to Santa Fe and the reservation, so it's as close to it as they can get.   Sharon: Absolutely. Where else are they going to get it, unless they go to Santa Fe?   Jennifer: And even then, you're so overwhelmed. There's so much product over there. All of it's handmade by Native American artists. It's a crazy time to do it with a lot of shops. It's hard to find good quality material that's authentic as well. But a lot of my clients do end up going on a holiday over there and want to be there.   Sharon: What are you looking for when you're there? You say it's hard to find the right things. What are you looking for?   Jennifer: I'm often hunting for early pieces that are by great artists, or things that are unusually aesthetically beautiful that impress me and are different to what I've found before. Or maybe it's similar to something I've found before, but I haven't seen something like that in a long time. It's a hunt for the rare and the unusual and the beautiful.    It's also visiting all my artists and seeing what is being made. In the winter, when they're planning to bring it to market in the summer, I'm talking with them about what they're going to make during the year. Am I going to set up a show with some of them? Can they make money if I buy from them at the Indian Market? Because they're trying to sell to the tourists at retail price. As a representative, I have to buy at a wholesale price, so I can buy it and present it to my clients here for a reasonable price. We talk about what they might build or make during the year. We talk about all of that. Would they like to come for a show? When would it suit both of us? It can't be in August, because I'm in America, or in September because I do my returns from my trip show. I have three other shows I do with my sister.     Then I'm looking, not for a huge amount of them, but for artworks and artifacts that are interesting, that resonate with the Southwest. Recently I got an old hunting lodge elk horn chandelier with little parchment shades over the lights. My electrician has to rewire it for the Australian current to hang it in the gallery. We're still working on that project. We've got to get it rewired and hung up in the ceiling and get a secure hook, but I'm bringing things into the gallery that make people feel connected with the Southwest.    There's something about that culture that—I don't know. I don't particularly believe in past lives and that kind of thing, but there's something about that culture that so resonates with me. I can't really explain it, but I just love it. It's the only place I feel at home when I get out of the plane and the Albuquerque airport, and I rent the car and head out to Zuni or wherever I'm going. If I'm driving across to Prescott or different places, I feel quite at home. It's a weird sensation. I also feel it while I'm here on the edge of the ocean. Those are two places where there's a sense of freedom and expanse and openness that I love.    Sharon: I can understand that. I can understand both the ocean and Santa Fe, with the light and the sunsets.   Jennifer: What is it? The plains, the wide-open spaces. It's a very open, incredible feeling of freedom. I don't know how to explain it. It is beautiful, and Santa Fe is very pretty with the housing and the pretty streets. Everything is adobe-style, and I do love that as an architectural form. It's very lovely, but what really is amazing is driving around the country in the Southwest. It's so open. I just love it. Just talking about it, I love it.   Sharon: Is there turquoise all over the country, all over the U.S.?   Jennifer: Only in the Southwest, so Nevada, I think some in Utah, and the very southern states. It comes from copper and iron areas, where you find copper and iron is mined heavily, thus the color of the turquoise. It's developed in veins within these mines. A lot of the beautiful turquoise like Bisbee and Villa Grove and Lander and some of the very rare or early turquoises were from small pockets of turquoise mines that were mined out and are now exhausted. You can't get those stones anymore, unless you get them from jewelry that was made some time ago with this quality of stone. Maybe somebody has been sitting on some raw material that they've yet to make things out of. Sometimes you buy at auction or estates, and you find old jewelry that has great stones, but the jewelry is ugly, so you pull it apart and give it to an artist to remake into a great piece.    A lot of the turquoise you get today, which is Sleeping Beauty or Kingman or from more general mines, it's more prolific in availability. A lot of it has been stabilized or treated so you can work with it. It's stronger and easier to work with, but getting good, natural stone is always my preference. If it's high grade, it won't change much in color because it's very dense and quite glossy. If it's more medium in grade, it'll be more porous, so more vulnerable to moisture acquisition. It will vary in color slightly over the years depending on your body oil. Not as much in the desert in the Southwest. The atmosphere there doesn't change it too much. Here in Australia, we're very humid, so it changes much differently than it does in the desert area. There's something charming about that. It's like it's alive. It's like it takes on some tones and colors of blue and green and everything in between depending on the wearer, the humidity, what country you live in. It's a very personal stone. It's like the stone and the sea. It's always changing.    Sharon: Can you look at a piece of turquoise and tell where it's from or if it's old?   Jennifer: Yes, you can tell whether it's recent and hasn't been around for very long. You can generally tell whether it's high grade, medium grade or low grade, depending on the density, the patina, the veining, all that kind of thing. Labeling what mine it comes from is a very tricky process because you have all these different mines scattered around the Southwest. Manassa is traditionally green, Kingman is traditionally blue, Blue Gem is traditionally very glossy, high grade and more of an aqua color. You'll get variations within the mine as well that tend a little more green or a little less or more polished. So, it'll look a little bit like another mine.   Then how old is the piece? I've been in discussion with dealers who have been handling turquoise for a long time. That will also help you decide where that stone probably came from, because that was the sort of stone they were using back when Leekya, for instance, was carving his turquoise stones. He liked the gentle, aqua-colored turquoise, and that was a particular stone. A more recent stone, Sleeping Beauty, is a high-grade, intense bluish stone. If it's more recently made, it's probably going to be that rather than Villa Grove, which is an older, softer, very blue stone, more of a cornflower blue. So yes, like anything, whether it be opals, pearls, old furniture, textiles, whatever, if you do your thing for long enough, you get to know all about it.   Sharon: And that's how you learned? You didn't study it, right?   Jennifer: I have a whole library here of books on North American Indian art, jewelry, painting, sculpture, kachinas, pottery, textiles. I've written articles all my life. I've been over there twice a year. I've looked at millions of pieces of jewelry, although not as many pieces of textiles and paintings and sculptures or pottery. So, it's experience, knowledge, rating, education. The hands-on piece is always significant. People like Teal McKibben, Lori Phillips, people who were before me, women in particular who I identify with, who spent their lives studying American Indian art. They've all passed away now or they're in their 80s. They taught me a lot, saying “Look at these. Look at how this is made and look at this stone.” It's been a life's education.   Sharon: It sounds like it. What's your favorite kind of jewelry?    Jennifer: My passionate thing that I love more than anything to this day is very early Navajo silversmithing and turquoise. That's what they call Villa Grove, or a sky blue turquoise stone. It's not as high-end as Blue Gem or Manassa or Lander or Indian Mountain—there's a whole lot of them—but I love the color. I love the soft, simple, understated, courageous and brave form of silver that the Navajo did in their silversmithing from learning to be blacksmiths, which is what they were first told they had to do. They were on the reservations shoeing the horses of the soldiers and the English and the French. Their talent for silversmithing evolved from that, with their strength and the creativity and simplicity and the beautiful execution of silver body adornment.    Originally it was all men making the silver things, so there's a masculine tone to it that I love as well. That's become the thing now. I'm wearing my salmon clothes. The balance of putting beautifully hammered, wonderful silver jewelry with simple sets of turquoise stone, on me, I just love it. Sometimes things are so beautiful. You look at so many things. How you can you tell why this one is better than this one? I say, “Well, look at it. Can't you see?” But that's me. So, that's probably my most passionate thing, early Navajo silver jewelry.   Then, after being in the business and dealing with it for a long time, I grew to really love Leekya Deyuse and Zuni carved turquoise jewelry. Leekya Deyuse was a Zuni carver that was probably working from the 1920s to the 1950s. He died in the 1960s fighting fires in Zuni. He was not all that old. Anyway, I have grown to love very much Leekya's carved turquoise. Not only turquoise; sometimes he did coral figures of leaves and bears and birds. His work is very hard to get, finely carved. He was one of the first guys who set the precedent of carving fetish necklaces on little animals and necklaces. He was one of the first to take the format of shell and stone and create it into a little medicine or good luck charm or protection from an animal. Then he took it another step further and started threading it on beads so you could wear it like a necklace. They are probably my two most favorite things to look for, really great Navajo jewelry and really great pieces by Leekya. There is certainly much more to it, but that's it if I was going to put it in a nutshell.   Sharon: Who should we keep our eyes on then?   Jennifer: Who's up and coming?   Sharon: Yes.   Jennifer: Cheryl Yestewa has been around for quite a long time, but I find her jewelry just fabulous and exploding in creativity in various ways. She works out of the desert, but she's into sea inspiration. Anyway, she's a wonderful artist.    I think Keri Ataumbi, who is—let me get the tribe right. Keri Ataumbi is Kiowa. She does really great work. I'm very excited about her work. We've had a couple of exhibitions of her work now, and she should be coming to her first exhibition in Sidney this Christmas.    Denise Wallace is a legend so she's not up and coming at all, but I think her son, David, is a great carver. Carving free form in ivory is a very difficult and challenging thing to do, and I think he's got a gift. I think David Wallace is somebody to watch. He's not putting himself out very much yet, but I think he's great.    I think for lapidary work—and she's been doing it for a while—she's the daughter of Cheryl Yestewa. Piki Wadsworth does the most beautiful lapidary. I think she just grows and excels and gets better and better at what she does. She's Hopi. I think these are the people that come to mind at the moment.    Every time I go down into Gallop, I have a look at different artists' works that are up and coming. A lot of them are doing some really interesting work, but a lot of them aren't wanting to go to Santa Fe or get high-profile or get noticed. I have to rely on people I know from that region to collect their work during the year. Then I go to them and see what they've made.   Sharon: It sounds very exciting. Thank you so much for being with us. It's been great talking with you.   Jennifer: It's been my pleasure and so much fun. I hope you do come to the Indian Market one day.   Thank you again for listening. Please leave us a rating and review so we can help others start their own jewelry journey.

What you'll learn in this episode: Why Native American jewelry has struck a chord with Australian shoppers Why jewelry is so important to Native American cultures, and the history of jewelry making in the Southwest Which characteristics to look for in distinct varieties of turquoise How to make the most of a trip to Indian Market Which Native American jewelry artists are ones to watch About Jennifer Cullen Jennifer Cullen is the owner of Four Winds Gallery, a jewelry gallery in Double Bay, Australia that focuses on jewelry of the American Southwest. Established in 1981, Four Winds boasts a collector's standard of traditional and contemporary North American Indian jewelry, pottery, sculptures, graphics and textiles. The gallery is the culmination of a long-term interest and passion for Jennifer.  Photos available on TheJewelryJourney.com Additional Resources: Website Instagram Facebook Transcript: The suburbs of Sydney, Australia might be the last place you'd expect to find a Native American jewelry gallery, but that's exactly what makes Jennifer Cullen's Four Winds Gallery so special. After a lifelong love affair with the jewelry of the American Southwest, Jennifer opened her gallery in Double Bay, a Sydney suburb known for its high-end shopping. She joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about the history behind Native American silversmithing; how she educated Australian collectors about Southwestern jewelry; and why turquoise is the most personal gemstone. Read the episode transcript here.  Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is a two-part Jewelry Journey Podcast. Please make sure you subscribe so you can hear part two as soon as it comes out later this week.    Today, my guest is Jennifer Cullen of Four Winds Gallery, an unusual jewelry gallery located in Double Bay, Australia. Jennifer is talking with us from Australia today. I say this is an unusual gallery because it focuses on Native American jewelry and jewelry of the Southwest. When I look at the jewelry, I immediately think of Santa Fe, New Mexico. I love the jewelry. Santa Fe happens to be one of my favorite places. I saw these pieces on Instagram and I was blown away because I thought, “How can this be in Australia?” She has this gallery in Australia with these beautiful Native American pieces. I'm looking forward to hearing Jennifer's jewelry journey today. Jennifer, welcome to the program.   Jennifer: Good morning from Double Bay, Sidney, Australia. I'm sure it's a good evening over there. It's so fun to talk with you.   Sharon: It's great to talk with you. You were just telling me about your jewelry journey, and I want to hear more about it.    Jennifer: Turquoise is my birthstone. This is how this whole thing started for me, back when I was teenager, born in December, being a Sagittarian. Australia doesn't really create turquoise as a birthstone here. We have little pockets of it, but it's waste. It's never looked at in the jewelry format. America is the land of fabulous turquoise. When I finished high school, my father happened to be CEO for Westinghouse, an American company. So, the family headed to the East Coast, as you would say. Westinghouse headquarters at the time was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When I went to the States, I put my university degree on hold here in Sidney and followed my parents. I wanted to buy some turquoise jewelry, and the first stop as a family traveling from Australia to America for the first time was Disneyland in California. We went to the gift shop in Frontierland, and I bought a great, big, funny turquoise, which I loved. My mother found it very curious, because my other jewelry was fine jewelry or gold jewelry that they had given me as they had gotten older. I loved it.    We made it to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is where my dad worked. I did classical ballet and psychology part-time at the local Pitt University to fill my time. One afternoon after university, I went to the bathroom and took my ring off to wash my hands. When I walked out, I forgot to put the ring back on. I went back in, and it was gone. I was devastated. My parents said, “Don't worry. There's a nice gallery in Pittsburgh. They have American Indian jewelry. Go check it out.” So, I went and found Four Winds Gallery in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and fell in love with the culture. The jewelry, the textiles, the pottery, everything American Indian and Southwestern that was in the gallery, I loved. I bought a new ring on layaway, as you call it. I spent a lot of time there talking about the jewelry with a guy named John Krena who runs and owns the place. He opened it in 1974. He taught me a lot about it and helped me understand it.    After two years, we moved back to Sidney. I didn't want to finish my university degree; I wanted to stay involved in and surrounded by the beauty of the artwork that comes from the Southwest done by American artists, who are quite gifted. I was interested in old jewelry and new, as well as paintings and artifacts and pottery and textiles to a degree, but the focus has always been the body adornment, the wearable art.   In 1981, I set up a tiny store in Double Bay in Sidney. People would come and say, “Oh, hi sweetie, what's all this blue stuff? Do you make it?” “Well, no. I wish I was so clever, but it's turquoise. It comes from the Southwest of the USA. It's made by multiple American Indian artists.” That's where it started. 41 years later, in 2022, I've changed stores a couple of times. I bought this store 3½ years ago. We're at it again, but it's been a journey, a hobby, a passion, a lifestyle and an income. It's something that I've enjoyed all my life.    The gallery has four exhibitions a year. I try to fly out artists for two of those exhibitions to meet my clients, because people like to meet the people who make the things and understand where it comes from. They are always contemporary artists. A big part of the gallery as well is the historical worth of vintage and antique jewelry. When I went on buying trips, which were every August and February up until Covid, I would come back and have a “return from a buying trip” exhibition. That would be a general exhibition in August of all the treasures I found on that adventure of three or four weeks in Santa Fe, Gallup, Scottsdale, Zuni, the Pueblos and various shows and things I've been exposed to. So, that's a general show.   During the year, I'd have a specific show for one of the great artists I represent, like Mike Bird-Romero. McKee Platero was out here one time. Cody Sanderson has been out many times. These are all Southwestern artists. Denise Wallace of the Wallace family, I've adored and represented her work for many, many years now. I also represented her husband before he suddenly passed away some time ago, and her daughter, Dawn, and son, David. They're Alaskan. Their work is fossilized marine ivory with scrimshaw set in beautiful silver and gold housings. The Southwestern jewelry is turquoise and coral and lapis and cream clamshells and all the various materials that hail from that kind of jewelry more predominantly.   Sharon: All of your jewelry is beautiful and instantly recognizable, but the Denise Wallace is so different than the other stuff.   Jennifer: Oh, absolutely.   Sharon: You just look at go, “Wow.”   Jennifer: And it reflects the Alaskan culture. She and her husband, Samuel, were obviously inspired a lot by her Alaskan heritage and where she comes from. The materials they work with are entirely made of silver and turquoise and whatnot, but in the museums over there, they'll start with masks and carvings that were done in the 1800s and early 1900s, and some earlier if you can find them in the different regions up there. She will study those and get inspired to turn the walrus mask, for instance, into a beautiful, big brooch.    I have a whole collection of her jewelry all in creams as well. It's a beautiful, soft coloring. It's all creams and yellows and a brownish caramel color, which is nice to wear with clothes because we really have a long summer in Australia. It's warm here from about the end of October through April, so you tend to wear paler clothing and lighter clothing, and I like to wear more jewelry at work. So, her work is really lovely to combine since you're able to put it on all the time during the hot summer months. It's very nice. I like all the very early works of the Pueblo artists called heishi. It's cream, and it goes beautifully with that as well.    But yeah, Denise's work represents the Alaskan culture and what goes on up there. Whereas in Southwestern culture, there are hundreds and hundreds of great jewelers who are doing beautiful silversmithing and lapidary. It's a very unique art form. Her son, David, I think he's one to watch. Dawn is already established as a great jeweler, and she's been working with him off and on for a long time. David is kind of quiet, and he doesn't like to get out in the public, but he's a great carver. I'm excited to watch him and see where he goes.   Sharon: When I go to Santa Fe, I love the Native American jewelry, but I have to temper myself because it's very easy to come back with all the Southwestern jewelry and artwork and go—   Jennifer: It's not relevant when you've gotten home and you're not going to put it in your home. Is that what you mean?   Sharon: I'll wear it. Here and there, I'll definitely wear it, but it's like, “Why did I buy 25 pieces? I'm not going to wear that all the time.”   Jennifer: That's interesting. I dress as a city woman. I don't wear satin and lace. Maybe I do occasionally, but I wear fine wool things in winter, cashmere, black. I dress as a city woman, which I always have done; I'm from Sydney, for goodness sake. In Double Bay, it's like the heart of cosmopolitan. It's like being in New York or Chicago or any city environment. That is where I grew up. So, this is the way I am, but for some reason, I just love wearing interesting sculptural jewelry that is not traditional gold and diamonds, fine chains and little bits and pieces and pearls. I think that's very pretty, but it doesn't make a difference when you put it on. It's pretty and you can wear it with anything, which I guess is a good thing. You can wear it with any kind of clothing.    This jewelry is a piece of wearable sculpture to me. It has impact. It has size. It has color. It has form. It has metal. It just makes me feel right when I wear it, and I wear it all the time. Even when I go to Pilates or I'm walking my dog, or when I'm down at the beach house, I wear a little pair of turquoise earrings. I always take a selection of blue turquoise pieces, maybe some green turquoise pieces to add to my orange oyster shell collection or my red coral collection. I always take plain silver. It's like a little black dress because it will go with anything. To me, it's worth putting on every day. It's to improve the way I feel and the way I look. As I get older, I like to wear even more pieces because I'm comfortable to do it. As I've grown up, the jewelry has become better, more significant, higher-end, and I don't worry anymore about, “Oh, what are people going to think if I wear this?” I just love it and I wear it.   I have a big following now nationally in Australia since the internet came to be and I got my website and all that business happened. When was that? In the early 2000s or something. You worry. You think, “Oh my gosh, now everyone can see what I'm doing. There's a whole load of beautiful galleries in America. Maybe business will change because everyone can look globally at everything.” But it actually just reinforces that if you do something well and focus on the best, and if you're knowledgeable about it and you have great quality pieces that are beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, it holds its own. My business has gone from strength to strength since then. We're open six days a week, 10:00 to 5:00. I'm in here three or four days a week. I'm in the States usually all of August. It used to be two weeks in February, but after Covid, we'll see whether that's still happening. That was more on the West Coast, in the San Francisco region. Sometimes if I had enough time, I would go down to the Heard Museum afterwards in March.   Sharon: The Heard Museum?   Jennifer: Yeah, the Heard Museum. I'd see the show there with all the current artists. It's expensive being away from the gallery, with international airfares, hotel accommodations, car rentals. I'll take my manager with me, Leslie, who's been with me for 20 years. He's very supportive and helps me keep going when you're in the rental car driving and saying, “Well, I think I should go check these out.” I wouldn't want to do it by myself. I've taken all of my daughters. They've been with me a few times. I have three daughters. They've all been with me. My sister's been with me. My mother's been with me. My father's been with me. Some girlfriends have been with me. My ex-husband has been with me a few times, but that didn't work too well. I never drive by myself. I like to travel with someone.   The whole overseas adventure is a very expensive one, to go there and spend a number of weeks and then come back again, but I have to go. I love to go. I like driving around over there, doing the reservations and getting out of the plane at Albuquerque, getting the rental car, driving into Gallop, going on the reservation, going out to Zuni, meeting different artists then ending up back in Santa Fe. I like going to all the old shows, meeting all the people that also love to collect and handle and look for this material, going to Indian markets, seeing more of the artists I've been representing for years who are all gathered together in the plaza for two days. It makes it easier for me to visit everyone.    It's been a great lifestyle. I've thoroughly enjoyed it, and it is an oddity. Dealing in North American Indian art on the other side of the world, it's a very established business. I've built incredible relationships. I had hoped one of my daughters might step into it and continue the Four Winds, not that I have any intention of retiring any time soon. My middle daughter points out to me repeatedly, “What? Working for my mom?” I'm like, “Well, it would be nice to keep the operation going forever.”   Sharon: Looking at the map, Double Bay isn't too far from Bondi Beach, is it?    Jennifer: Oh no, it's probably 10 minutes by car. Bondi Beach is on the coast on the ocean, and Double Bay is on Sidney Harbor. It's kind of an elegant, harbor side, upmarket, expensive little shopping area that's also probably five to 10 minutes from the city. The city is on the harbor. Double Bay is also farther away on the harbor going towards the coast. Then there's a little finger of land that runs up and down, and then on the other side of the little finger of land is Bondi Beach. So, it's very close to Bondi Beach.    People who come from other states and internationally stay in Double Bay in one of the hotels, or they stay in the city. We're very close to the city. They'll get a taxi or an Uber, or you can get a train or a bus; public transport here is really good. So, you're smack bang between the ocean coast and the city. I'm about halfway between. It's a very, very pretty harborside shopping area. I'm trying to think—you know Carmel—   Sharon: Yes, Carmel.   Jennifer: —in California, that feeling that you're not on a cliff; you're down on sea level.   Sharon: Are you near Sidney? When you say the city, is that Sidney?   Jennifer: It's Sidney. Double Bay is one of those smaller suburbs of Sidney. Sidney's a very big town. I think we have about six million people in Sidney. Double Bay is a five- or 10-minute cab ride from downtown Sidney. You can still call Double Bay Sidney, but it's a suburb of Double Tree close to Sidney. Most of my clients actually come from New South Wales, which is the state that Sidney is in. We have more clients from Australia now, New Zealand, South Africa, Paris, England, America, scattered all over the place. It's fun. A lot of people from France and England and New Zealand and different places come to Sidney in January, which is the peak of our summer, to get out of the winter or to visit family or friends they have in Australia. Or they come to see Australia. They visit and travel around.   Sharon: Do Australians wander into your shop and say, “Oh my God, what is this?” What's the reaction?   Jennifer: Yes, exactly. Back in the early days in the 80s, they would wander in. I was 21 years old back then, and the counter belt is at least $2,500. People would say, “Where do you sell these blue things? Do you make it?” I'd say, “I wish I was so clever. It's turquoise. It's made by artists from the Southwest of the USA,” and the talking and educating would go on. We're starting from there. A lot of them would come in and go, “What is all this stuff, really?”    Then I would get the odd person who was a big collector who would find me. He'd go, “I can't believe you're doing this in Sidney, Australia. I'm from London, and I'm collecting the Southwest,” or “They've got a gallery where I buy things in London.” You would get some people that knew about it who were already collectors. Then they would talk to other people and say, “Go to that store, the Four Winds Gallery down in Sidney. She has really good material. She's quite authentic.” It was word of mouth for a long time, doing my shows, plugging away, talking, working six days a week, having no staff. It's the energy of a 21-year-old woman building a following for it.    Now, 41 years later, I am in Double Bay. I've been around. I've expanded the gallery. I've owned a store, and I've been here as a very established business for a long time. Everyone in this region knows me. Anybody who knows anything about turquoise will be out in a restaurant in the city, and if somebody has something turquoise on, they'll say, “Oh, did you get that at Four Winds?” It's either, “Yeah,” or, “No, I went on a holiday to Santa Fe.” It's a commonly used reference point now. You still get the odd person walking in now, but it was more in the first 10 years of having the business that people would walk in who'd never been in before or never heard of it and say, “What's going on here? What is this all about?”    American Indian jewelry has become more internationally and globally known with the internet, with social media, with all the things that are going on in America, the mining rights and water rights, going to reservations, the interviews that come on NBC or the radio stations or TV stations in America. I do interviews and stories on what's happening on the tribal reservations and the injustices that are happening. It brings it more to the spotlight, and then it melds into the artwork and what's going on. So, the beautiful Southwestern American Indian artwork is not as unheard of now as it was in the 80s in Sidney, Australia, when no one on earth knew what any of it was. It's been a progress of education.   Sharon: That's interesting. I remember ages ago buying one turquoise ring. Everybody had to have one turquoise ring, and that was it.   Jennifer: Also, when you look at the 70s and the hippie phase and the bikers and flower power, there was all that association with turquoise, bear claws and feathers, which was fun, but that was kind of insane. A lot of people didn't identify with that, right or wrong. It was like, “We're going to get into the hippie jewelry.” But I think having all of that and recognizing it as fine art, the labeling doesn't matter, actually. Yes, it is Southwest and yes, it is Native American Indian. It is fabulous both historically and recently made. But it is a fine art form if you look at how it's made, how the silver is executed, how the lapidary is done, the history they've inherited for generations about how to work with metal or cut stone or drill shells. As a tribal jewelry form, it's the most sophisticated tribal jewelry form in the world, bar none to any other tribal group. It's just amazing as an art form.    I like to think that you don't have to resonate with Southwestern, cowgirl, cowboy, denim, hats and whatnot to love and embrace this art form. It's just a beautiful, wearable art form irrespective. That's always been my belief. This is not a gallery where I come to work every day in jeans and boots and a hat. It's just my thing. It is if you're from the country or you've bought a cattle property, but we're city people and city folk.    We have paintings and kachina carvings and some pottery. These are beautiful pieces, quite classic in somebody's home. It's white walls and timber floors. It's plain and very modern how people decorate today, but with this beautiful piece of artwork. They might have one or two great pots as feature pieces, but they don't become pottery collectors per se, as I see people in the Southwest do, where there are ledges and ledges built to house dozens and dozens of pots by a particular tribe because they're a collector. People don't do that here because our architecture and our lifestyle are very different. They have polished floorboards. They'll have a lovely, seasoned marble kitchen bench top, and everything's kind of washed and gray and black and modern and minimal, all of that. Then they'll have the odd piece as a beautiful art piece in their home, but they'll also have something from Japan, and they might have an early Australian aboriginal piece, rather than having the whole placed decked down in Southwestern artifacts or paintings.   With jewelry, you find that people can be general jewelry enthusiasts who collect great jewelry from all over the world, but you tend to find that people like the turquoise, the blues and the greys and the strong, big, sculptural silver. You think it's a really big piece of jewelry, but try and recreate that same belt, for instance, in 18-karat gold set with huge diamonds. It would be millions. It would be unapproachable for a lot of people. So, it's also the materials that are special. They're collectable. It's one-off. It's unique, but at this point, it's still not treated the same. For instance, this is a huge piece of turquoise in a ring by McKee Platero. That's large. If you try to replicate that size stone in a ruby or an emerald or a diamond, one, it would be very hard to find. Two, it would be extortionate because it's so big. But I can secure a natural piece of high-grade turquoise that's large and beautiful. It's not artificial and it's not a copy or a reproduction. It's the real deal, and that gives me a lot of joy, wearing a unique piece of sculpture.

What you'll learn in this episode:   Why we often have more information about gold than any other decorative object The difference between material culture and material studies, and how these fields shaped the study of art and jewelry What John wants visitors to take away from “Gold in America: Artistry, Memory and Power” Why history is much more global than we may think What it really means to curate, and why it's an essential job   About John Stuart Gordon   John Stuart Gordon is the Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Yale University Art Gallery. He grew up among the redwoods of Northern California before venturing East and receiving a B.A. from Vassar College, an M.A. from the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, and a PH.D. from Boston University. He works on all aspects of American design and has written on glass, American modernism, studio ceramics, and postmodernism. His exhibition projects have explored postwar American architecture, turned wood, and industrial design. In addition, he supervises the Furniture Study, the Gallery's expansive study collection of American furniture and wooden objects. Additional Resources: Yale University Art Gallery Website Yale University Art Gallery Instagram John Stuart Gordon Instagram Photos available on TheJewelryJourney.com   Transcript:   Perhaps more than any other metal or gem, gold brings out strong reactions in people (and has for all of recorded history). That's what curator John Stuart Gordon wanted to explore with “Gold in America: Artistry, Memory, Power,” a featured exhibition now on view at the Yale University Art Gallery. He joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about why people have always been enchanted by gold; what he discovered while creating the exhibit; and why curation is more that just selecting a group of objects. Read the episode transcript here.  Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the second part of a two-part episode. Today, my guest is John Stuart Gordon, the Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Yale University Art Gallery. Welcome back.    I'm curious; I know you recently had a group from Christie's studying jewelry that came to visit your exhibit. I'm curious if they asked different questions, or if there's something that stood out in what they were asking that might have been different from a group studying something else.    John: Every group is different. I love them all, and I learn so much from taking groups of visitors through because you start looking at objects through their lens. Recently a group of makers came through and, wow, that was a wonderful experience, because I could make a reference to, “Oh, look at the decoration on this,” and then, “Is it chaste or is it gadroon?” “What kind of anvil are they working with?” We have to answer these questions. There are some things I can't answer but a maker can identify easily, so I'm learning things.    Maybe someone who's a collector or an appraiser is thinking about objects in a very different way, wanting to know how rare it is, if there are only a handful, where they are, how many are still in private collections, what's in the museum collection. One of my favorite tours was with a small group of young children who had a completely different set of preconceived notions. I had to explain what an 18th century whistle and bells would have been used for because they'd never seen one before. I had to talk about what kinds of child's toys they remembered from when they were kids, trying to relate. Every group has a slightly different lens, and you can never anticipate the questions they're going to ask.   Sharon: Yes, they're coming at you from the weirdest angles. In putting this together, what surprised you most about gold in America? What surprised you most about putting this exhibit together? What made you say, “Gosh, I never knew that,” or “I never thought about that”? There's a lot, but what's the overriding question, let's say.    John: It's such a nerdy answer, and I apologize for being such a nerd, but what surprised me the most was an archival discovery. Mind you, this all takes place against the background of lockdown and having way too much time on our hands and looking for distractions. I pulled a historical newspaper database that the library subscribes to, and I typed in the word “gold” and pushed enter. There were about three million responses that came back, and I just started reading my way through. Not all of them were interesting, but I was struck by the frequency with which people were discussing gold, and I was struck by the global knowledge at a very early period. I would find articles written in the 1720s in colonial Boston talking about the Spanish fleets leaving Havana Harbor with amounts of silver and gold onboard. They would describe how much gold, how much silver, was it coins, was it bars, was it unrefined. There was a newspaper report coming out of New York in the 1750s talking about a new gold strike at a mine in Central Europe. That was truly unexpected: to realize that this material was of such importance that people were talking about it on a daily basis, and that it was newsworthy on this global scale. People weren't just talking about what was going on in colonial Boston or colonial Philadelphia. They were talking about what was going on in Prussia and Bogota. I think we often think of early history as very insular, and we think of our present day as global. History has always been global, and it was a lovely reminder of how global our culture always has been.   Sharon: That's interesting, especially talking about global. I just reread Hamilton. They're talking about Jefferson and Madison and everybody going over to France and coming back. I think about the boats, and I think, “Oh, my god.” I think of everybody as staying in place. You couldn't get me on one of those boats. What a voyage. But that was global. Everybody was communicating with everybody else. So, yes, it always has been that way, but it's very surprising, the movement that has been there for so long. We could go on and on about that.    Let me ask you this: Yale Art Gallery just received a donation from Susan Grant Lewin of modern jewelry, art jewelry, on the cutting edge. At the museum and gallery, is the emphasis more on jewelry as part of material culture and decorative arts? Not every museum or art gallery would have been open to it. What's the philosophy there?   John: Yes, we just received a gift of about two dozen pieces of contemporary jewelry from Susan Grant Lewin, who is a collector and scholar. We've also received a gift from the Enamel Arts Foundation, which is a foundation that collects and promotes enamel objects and jewelry. We have a long history of collecting jewelry, and it's based on historic collections. The core of the American decorative arts collection is the Mabel Brady Garvan Collection. It started coming to the art gallery in 1930. It's this rather storied collection. It covers everything you can imagine: furniture, glass, ceramics, textiles, you name it.    It was assembled by a man named Francis P. Garvan, who was a Yalee. He graduated in the late 19th century and he gave it in honor of his wife. His main love, after his wife and his family, was silver, and the collection at Yale is probably the most important collection of early American silver in any museum. Silversmiths and goldsmiths, the names are interchangeable, and it is mostly men at that period who were making silver objects and gold objects. They're also making jewelry. As you take the story forward, it doesn't change a lot. People who are trained as metalsmiths often will make holloware and/or jewelry. The fields are very closely allied, and the techniques are very closely allied. So for us, it makes complete sense to have this very important historical collection of metalwork go all the way up to the present.   We have a lot of 20th century jewelry, now 21st century jewelry. We also have contemporary holloware because we like being able to tell a story in a very long arc. The way someone like Paul Revere is thinking about making an object and thinking about marketing himself is related to how someone graduating from SUNY New Paltz or RISD are thinking about how to make an object and how to market themselves. Often it's the same material, the same hammers, the same anvils. So, it's nice to show those continuities and then to bring in how every generation treats this material slightly differently. They have their own ideas and their own technologies.    So, the Susan Grant Lewis Collection is a very experimental work. She has said she doesn't like stones, so you're not going to see a lot of gem setting and a lot of diamonds and rubies set in gold. There's nothing wrong with them, but she's more interested in people who are more out there, thinking about how you turn 3D printing into art or how you use found materials and construct narratives and make things that are more unexpected.   Sharon: I just want to interrupt you a minute.  SUNY New Paltz is the New York State University at New Paltz?   John: State University of New York at New Paltz. Sorry, I gave you the shorthand.   Sharon: I know RISD is the Rhode Island Institute—   John: We're going to have to submit an index on how to understand all my acronyms. Yes, RISD is the Rhode Island School of Design. There are a handful of institutions that have really strong jewelry departments and really strong metalworking departments, among them Rhode Island School of Design, State University of New York at New Paltz. You can add Cranbrook, which is outside of Detroit. There's a whole group of them that are producing wonderful things.   Sharon: So, you studied decorative arts. What was your master's in?   John: I was an art historian. I was very lucky in college to have a professor who believed in material culture, and I asked, “Do I have to write about paintings?” and she said, “No, you don't.” I was very lucky to find that in college. Then I went to the Bard Graduate Center in New York. It was a much longer title, the Graduate Center for Material Culture and Design. It changes its name every two years. My master's was in kind of a history of design and material culture. Then to get a Ph.D., there are very few programs that allow people to focus on material culture. Luckily, there are more with every passing year. When I was going to school, Yale is one that's always focused on decorative arts and material culture. Boston University, their American studies program is a historically strong program that allows you to look at anything in the world as long as you can justify it. So, that's where I went.   Sharon: Was jewelry like, “Oh yeah, and there's jewelry also,” or was jewelry part of the story, part of the material culture, the material objects that you might look at? Was it part of any of this?   John: It was. I am at core a metals person. My master's thesis was written on the 1939 New York World's Fair, looking at one pavilion where Tiffany, Cartier and a few others had their big exhibition of silver, gold and, of course, jewelry. My entry into it was silver, but I had to learn all the jewelry as well. So, jewelry has always been part of my intellectual DNA, but it didn't really flourish until I got to Yale, and that would be because of my colleague, Patricia Kane. She has a deep knowledge and interest in jewelry. We have done a few jewelry exhibitions in the past, and she has seen it as part of the collection that should grow. I arrived at Yale as a scrappy, young curator seeing what was going on in the landscape, and the jewelry is amazing. One of my first conferences I went to was a craft conference. I met jewelers and metalsmiths, and it's a really approachable group. They're very friendly. They like talking about their ideas. They like talking about their work, which is really rewarding.   Sharon: What were your ideas when you started as a curator? Did you have the idea, “Oh, I'd love to do exhibition work”? Curate has become such a word today. Everybody is curating something.   John: Yes, my head is in my hands right now. One of my pet peeves is that people talk about curating their lunches. The word curate actually means to care for, so I think about the religious role of a curate. It's the same role. Our job is really to care for collections. If you care for your lunch, you can curate it, but if you're just selecting it, please use a different word.    That idea of caring for objects, that's what really excited me as a curator; the idea that so much of what we do is getting to know a collection, to research it, to make sure it's being treated well, that things are stable when they go on loan, that when things need treatment, you work with a conservator or a scientist. I was really excited by that.    Over the course of my career, I've become much broader in my thinking. When you come out of graduate school, you've spent years focusing down deeper and deeper on one small, little subject. I was still very focused on a very narrow subject when I became a curator. That was early 20th century design. I love it dearly, but over the years my blinders have come off. I love American modernism. I also love 17th century metalwork. I love 21st century glass. You realize you love everything in the world around you.   Sharon: Would you say your definition of curate is still to care for? I'm thinking about when I polish my silver. I guess it's part of curating in a sense, taking care of things.    John: Polishing your silver or your jewelry is actually one of the best ways to get to know it. We're one of the few collections where it's the curators who polish the silver. We hold onto that task because we don't do it very often, because it's better to leave things unpolished if you don't have to. But when it comes time to polish something, the opportunity to pick something up, to turn it over, to feel the weight of it, to look closely at the marks and the details, that's a really special thing, to get to know your objects so well by doing it. I give a hearty endorsement of silver polishing. It's also a great emotional therapy if you've had a tough day. But to your question, I even more strongly believe that the role of a curator is someone to care for their collections.   Sharon: I really like that. It gives me a different perspective.   John: Yeah, because what we're doing is not just physical care; it's emotional care. In today's culture we talk so much about self-care and these kinds of tropes, but that's a lot of what we're doing. We're understanding history through our objects. We're understanding the objects better to have something preserved for posterity, so it can tell future generations stories.   Sharon: That's interesting. John, thank you so much. By the way, the exhibit ends in July, but the Susan Grant Lewin Collection is open through September. You'll be busy, it sounds like.   John: “Gold in America: Artistry, Memory, Power” closes July 10. The Susan Grant Lewin Collection of American Jewelry will be up through the fall. If you miss both of those or you're in a place where you can't get to New Haven, our collections are all online. All you have to do is go to our website, and you can just click through and spend a day looking at objects from the comfort of your living room.   Sharon: Yes, and very nice photos. As I said, I was looking at them before we started. I was very interested. What was that used for? Where did it come from? I guess being in Los Angeles, I'll have to do that. I'll be doing that from my living room. John, thank you so much. This is very, very interesting. I learned a lot and you have given me a lot to think about, so thank you so much.   John: Thank you for having me.   Thank you again for listening. Please leave us a rating and review so we can help others start their own jewelry journey.

What you'll learn in this episode: The characteristics that define contemporary American jewelry What narrative art jewelry is, and why it was so prevalent in the 1960s and 70s What defines American counterculture, and why so many 60s and 70s jewelers were a part of it Who the most notable American jewelry artists are and why we need to capture their stories How Susan and Cindi developed their book, and why they hope other people will build on their research About Susan Cummins Susan Cummins has been involved in numerous ways in the visual arts world over the last 35 years, from working in a pottery studio, doing street fairs, running a retail shop called the Firework in Mill Valley and developing the Susan Cummins Gallery into a nationally recognized venue for regional art and contemporary art jewelry. Now she spends most of her time working with a private family foundation called Rotasa and as a board member of both Art Jewelry Forum and California College of the Arts. About Cindi Strauss Cindi Strauss is the Sara and Bill Morgan Curator of Decorative Arts, Craft, and Design and Assistant Director, Programming at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH). She received her BA with honors in art history from Hamilton College and her MA in the history of decorative arts from the Cooper-Hewitt/Parsons School of Design. At the MFAH, Cindi is responsible for the acquisition, research, publication, and exhibition of post-1900 decorative arts, design, and craft. Jewelry is a mainstay of Cindi's curatorial practice. In addition to regularly curating permanent collection installations that include contemporary jewelry from the museum's collection, she has organized several exhibitions that are either devoted solely to jewelry or include jewelry in them. These include: Beyond Ornament: Contemporary Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection (2003–2004); Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection (2007); Liquid Lines: Exploring the Language of Contemporary Metal (2011); and Beyond Craft: Decorative Arts from the Leatrice S. and Melvin B. Eagle Collection (2014). Cindi has authored or contributed to catalogs and journals on jewelry, craft, and design topics, and has been a frequent lecturer at museums nationwide. She also serves on the editorial advisory committee for Metalsmith magazine. Additional Resources:  Museum of Fine Arts Houston Art Jewelry Forum  Photos: Police State Badge 1969/ 2007 sterling silver, 14k gold 2 7/8 x 2 15/16 x 3 15/16 inches Museum of Arts and Design, New York City, 2012.20 Diane Kuhn, 2012 PHOTO: John Bigelow Taylor, 2008 Portrait of William Clark in a bubble_2 1971                        photographer: Unknown Necklace for the American Taxpayer 1971 Brass with silver chain  17 " long (for the chain)  and 6.25 x 1.25 " wide for the hanging brass pendant. Collection unknown Dad's Payday 1968 sterling, photograph, fabric, found object 4 ½ x 4 x ¼ inches Merrily Tompkins Estate, Ellensburg Photo: Lynn Thompson Title: "Slow Boat" Pendant (Portrait of Ken Cory) Date: 1976 Medium: Enamel, sterling silver, wood, copper, brass, painted stone, pencil, ballpoint pen spring, waxed lacing, Tiger Balm tin, domino Dimensions: 16 3/4 × 4 1/8 × 1 in. (42.5 × 10.4 × 2.5 cm) Helen Williams Drutt Family Collection, USA Snatch Purse 1975 Copper, Enamel, Leather, Beaver Fur, Ermine Tails, Coin Purse 4 ½ x 4 x 3/8” Merrily Tompkins Estate, Ellensburg The Good Guys 1966 Walnut, steel, copper, plastic, sterling silver, found objects 101.6 mm diameter Museum of Arts and Design, NYC, 1977.2.102'                        PHOTO: John Bigelow Taylor, 2008 Fetish Pendant 1966 wood, brass, copper, glass, steel, paper, silver 3 ½ x 3 ½ x 5/8 inches Detroit Institute of Art, Founders Society Purchase with funds from the Modern Decorative Arts Group, Andrew L. and Gayle Shaw Camden Contemporary and Decorative Arts Fund, Jean Sosin, Dr. and Mrs. Roger S. Robinson, Mr. and Mrs. Marvin Danto, Dorothy and Byron Gerson, and Dr. and Mrs. Robert J. Miller / Bridgeman Images November 22, 1963 12:30 p.m. 1967 copper, silver, brass, gold leaf, newspaper photo, walnut, velvet, glass 6 ¼ x 5 x 7/8 inches Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Rose Mary Wadman, 1991.57.1 Front and back covers Pages from the book Transcript: What makes American jewelry American? As Susan Cummins and Cindi Strauss discovered while researching their book, In Flux: American Jewelry and the Counterculture, contemporary American jewelry isn't defined by style or materials, but by an attitude of independence and rebellion. Susan, who founded Art Jewelry Forum, and Cindi, who is Curator of Decorative Arts, Crafts and Design at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about what it was like to interview some of the most influential American artists; why they hope their book will inspire additional research in this field; and why narrative jewelry artists were part of the counterculture, even if they didn't consider themselves to be. Read the episode transcript here.  Sharon: Definitely, it's a history book, but it's not, because you really do get that flavor for who they are or what they were passionate about or what they were trying to express. I'm just curious; how did you distill all of this into counterculture? Was that something that you decided in a brainstorm? You could have come up with a lot of different things. Cindi: I'm going to let Susan to take that, because—and I admit this freely—I had a very specific idea of what the counterculture was and how people slotted into that. Through Susan and Damian, my understanding of the counterculture was broadened in such an incredible way. They really pushed me to open up my mindset and think about it in many different, layered ways, and I have benefited from that dramatically. So, Susan led that. Susan, I'll turn it over to you. Susan: O.K., and I'll try and answer. We had decided to focus on the 60s and 70s and limit it to that time period. That was the counterculture time period, and as I said before, there are so many in the craft world, which I was participating in during that time, that reflect the sensibilities of the counterculture. As we were interviewing these people, what was really interesting is that many of them didn't necessarily think of themselves of part of the counterculture. They thought of themselves as hardworking jewelers that couldn't be part of the counterculture because that was the dropout, don't do anything, take drugs part of the world. But that wasn't really the counterculture.  The counterculture was especially young people who were opposed to the way that people were living their lives. That got really defined in the 50s, which was a very austere, go to work, make money, buy a refrigerator, get a house and even if it was killing you, do this kind of life. They said, “We don't want that. We want a life that feels meaningful to us, that has real value.” In all kinds of different ways, that was what the counterculture consisted of: thinking in a different way about how life could be for us, something that's meaningful, something that you love doing, something that has some consideration of ecology and equal rights and all of the counterwar attitudes reflected in it. That was really what people wanted to do. The counterculture is big and broad.  A lot of people who thought, for example, that Fred Woell was a Boy Scout. If you asked Fred or you saw his papers or you asked his wife, “What kind of car did Fred drive?” A VW van. What kind of food did he eat? Natural foods. Did he build himself a house? Yes, he did, with solar panels on it. He was a counterculture guy. He just looked like a Boy Scout. A lot of the things you learn in the Boy Scouts were actually part of the counterculture, too, the survival skills and all of that. It's a funny thing to say, but I think in the process of writing this book, we convinced a lot of the jewelers we interviewed that they were part of the counterculture even though they hadn't realized it themselves either. Sharon: That's interesting. Did you enter this process thinking that these people were part of the counterculture, or was that something that came to you as put everything together? Susan: I think it was kind of there from the beginning, but not really. I think we discovered it along the way. In fact, I don't think we were thinking about having the word counterculture in the title. I think for a long time we thought it would be “American Jewelry in the 60s and 70s.” I think it was a provocative idea to put counterculture in the title. It might be that it was a bad idea because, as Cindi said, a lot of people have a narrow point of view as to what the counterculture is, but I hope that if anybody decides to pick up the book, they can find a much broader definition, which I think is the real definition. To limit it is not fair to the expression. Sharon: I think the book does broaden the definition. Before reading the book or looking at the book, I entered into it thinking of Sausalito. I grew up on the West Coast, so to me, the counterculture was Sausalito. My family and I drove through there once when I was a young person, so that was the counterculture, or Berkeley was the counterculture. I Googled the word counterculture, and it's interesting because it goes through all different periods of history that were counterculture. It wasn't just the 60s and 70s. Who did you feel it was wrenching to leave out of the book when you had make some decisions? Cindi: Before I would answer that specifically, to give a little more context, there were a number of jewelry artists who were personally active in all the ways we were highlighting in this book, but their jewelry itself didn't reflect that. We had long debates about how to deal with that. Ultimately, for better or for worse, it came down to the fact that at the end of the day, the book was about the jewelry. It was rooted in the actual works of art. There were artists whose jewelry did not reflect their personal lives. With those artists, we were able to include them in the book in terms of quotes and information that helped set the stage and provide information, whether it was about things from their own lives, if they were professors, what was in their program, but their jewelry wasn't necessarily featured. I'm thinking of someone like Eleanor Moty, who was incredibly helpful in terms of the interview that Susan did and being a sounding board, but her jewelry didn't make it into the book pictorially. There were others who were also like that.  I think I wouldn't necessarily call it gut-wrenching, but it was something we struggled with over a period of time, because these were artists who were very active; they were active in shows; they were teaching; they were going to Summervale; they were going to SNAG, some of them, some of them not. For me, Wayne Coulter is probably the big regret. I did an extensive interview with Wayne and his wife, Jan Brooks, and it was a great interview. He was very involved with Summervale, and a lot of his jewelry would have fit pictorially in the book, but we were never quite able to get the images and the materials we needed to include the jewelry. He's included, as is Jan, in terms of quotes and things like that. For me, that would be one that I regret. Sharon: This is not to say anybody's second tier. I don't mean that. Cindi: Oh no, not at all. Sometimes there are practicalities. This is a time when a lot of the artists don't even know, necessarily, where their jewelry from the late 60s or early 70s resides. Maybe they had slides of it, but those slides may not exist, or they may have been completely discolored. There were practical issues that made certain pieces and/or certain artists—we were unable to go as far as we wanted to. Susan, what do you think? Susan: Yeah, I completely agree with all that. I would say that we interviewed a lot of people that didn't get in the book. There was a lot of jewelry that started up right at the very end of the 70s and went into the 80s. We squeaked in a couple of those people, but what you have to think about is that we're showing you or talking about examples of people in various phases. Some people were very political. Some people weren't so political in their work necessarily, but they lived a counterculture lifestyle and participated in counterculture activities, and it shows up in their jewelry but not as strongly as in others. We tried to give a mix of examples of the things we were talking about, but as Cindi said, there were lots of people we interviewed that never showed up in the book. We must have interviewed Laurie Hall, for example, about three times. Her work isn't in the book, but Damian went on to write about her. That book will be coming out in the fall. We acquired an awful lot of information that didn't ever get in the book and people we interviewed that didn't get in the book. You just have to go with the most obvious choices at a certain point and think of them as examples of other people that you could have included, but you didn't. Maybe some people were upset by that, but you do have to make some decisions. As Cindi said, there are certain practical limitations. Sharon: I think I gave a birthday party when I was 13, and I was so traumatized by having to make decisions about the guest list. I always wonder about it, if you make decisions about who to put in and who to leave out. Do you know the name of the book about Laurie Hall? What's it called? Susan: It's called North by Northwest: The Stories of Laurie Hall. Or maybe The Jewelry of Laurie Hall. Sharon: That leads into my next question. Is there going to be a part two or an addition to the book you just wrote, In Flux? There's so much more material. Susan: Definitely, there's more material. Somebody needs to look at African-American jewelers. We barely got to include some aspects of that. Native American jewelers, too, have a whole history that we didn't really cover at all. These things are whole topics unto themselves, really. We hope someone will take up the mantle and find out more about that. There's a huge amount of continuing research. We don't have any plans to do that, so anybody listening can definitely take it up. Go for it. It's up to you. Sharon: It sounds like a great PhD project. Cindi: Yeah, it can be a PhD thesis. There could be a series of articles. It doesn't have to be a big book about something. You could do all whole symposium based on this topic. You started off with a question about our jewelry journey. I think this is and will be, for all of us, an ongoing journey. Susan and Damian have written this book on Laurie Hall. There will be other threads that, either collectively or individually, we'll want to take up in continuing our own journey off of this book, areas that piqued our interest and we'll go from there. As Susan said, we're hoping people will pick up the mantle. One of the things we learned through this process, and it's probably a lesson that should have been obvious to us beforehand, but the field of American jewelry is a young field. For most of its history, there have been dominant narratives. I'm part of that group of people who have helped with those dominant narratives. As a field evolves, you lay down the baseline, then you focus on individual artists, then you go back and start to layer in additional histories in a way that you can actually understand the full field. A lot of the artists we included in In Flux worked on the outskirts of what was previously the dominant narrative. I think as we proved, that doesn't make their work any less significant, influential, etc. from artists who were part of the dominant narrative. It's a phenomenal way for the field to continue to grow. I hope that as more institutions of all types focus on contemporary jewelry, it will engender additional layers of that story which will continue to propel the field forward. Sharon: Cindi, I noticed that when you look the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston website, you've been involved in a lot of online programming and symposia and things I didn't realize. I'm wondering when you're going to have a symposium on this subject. Cindi: It would be terrific. Up to this point, Susan and I have been invited to give talks. We did one with Craft in America last fall. We did with MAD. We've been invited on your jewelry podcast. I'm also going to be speaking for the Seattle Metals Guild Symposium next month. I would love to do a symposium. For me, in order to do a symposium right, it's not just about getting speakers together, which you can do virtually, but it's really about them coming together and having that in-person experience where you can have breakout sessions; you have the conversations in the hallways, all of those kinds of things. I would absolutely love to do that when it's safe to do it, which is not to say that—there are no current plans. I think our virtual talks have been fantastic, but it would be great to gather the tribe, so to speak, to gather people we interviewed for this book, to gather people who are interested and to share a day or two together to dive into this. I hope that can happen. Certainly, the door is open to it. I just think right now we're still figuring out what we can do in person and what we can't. Susan: I know many of those people are quite elderly at this point in time. Even as we were writing the book, people were dying. Cindi: Yeah, Ed Woell died. Ron Hill died, and now Nancy Gordon has died. Susan: Mary Tompkins passed away. Cindi: Mary Tompkins passed away. Several people had already passed away, but this history will not be quite the same unless people go and interview these older makers soon. This is part of the problem: with them dies a huge amount of information. It's impossible to know anything concrete about a jeweler unless you actually talk to them. Anyway, I hope that if people do want to take up this mantle or if they do a symposium, they do it soon, because they may be all gone by the time we get there. Sharon: People do it on Cartier and Renee Beauvois, and they're not around. Susan: They also kept better records and took better photographs. With those wealthy jewelry companies, it's very different than being a unique maker on your own in your little studio. Many of these people weren't even taking photographs of the work at the time necessarily, or if they were, certainly they were not great ones. They just clicked on a photo link on a slide back. This is not the wealthy, recorded advertising world of Cartier. This is a very different world. Cindi: As someone who has done a Cartier exhibition, I can also tell you that it's about the firm and about styles. You don't learn about who the individual designers were of X, Y and Z pieces, but Susan's right. For artists who are listening to this, it is incumbent upon you to document your work. Today, there are obviously tools that artists from the 60s and 70s could not have availed themselves of, which would have made it much easier. So, document your work, keep track of your work and update the way you document it, so that somebody 30 or 40 years from now who is wanting to do something in depth on you is not having to battle with an old technology that nobody knows how to use anymore, which then can make things invaluable. I'm old school. I'm a big believe in paper. I know that is completely against the way the world works, but I am wary. I have experience with recorded, even digital formats, that we don't have the equipment to use anymore; nobody knows how to use it. If you have a paper printout, you're never going to have that problem. I know that this is environmentally incorrect, that everybody's moving towards digital files. I have them myself, but I still like paper because it's what's going to be preserved for history. Sharon: That's very good advice about documenting. It benefits the artist now and makes life easier for those who follow as historians and people who want to look at it academically. Susan and Cindi, thank you so much for being with us today. It was so interesting. Susan, we look forward to your next part, 1A I guess we'll call it. Thank you so much. Susan: Thanks for having us, Sharon. It's been wonderful. Cindi: Thank you, Sharon. Sharon: Delighted to have you. Cindi: Please do let your audiences know that the book is widely available. My plug on all these things is that we know you can buy books from Amazon. Please buy your book from a local independent bookseller, or even better, come to the MFAH's website. You can buy it off of our website, which goes to support our museum's programs.   We will have images posted on the website. You can find us wherever you download your podcasts, and please rate us. Please join us next time, when our guest will be another jewelry industry professional who will share their experience and expertise. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you again for listening. Please leave us a rating and review so we can help others start their own jewelry journey.  

In a world where so many other people are doing the same thing, how do you combat that? For Gorjana Reidel, it was to provide excellent customer service and looking at what's working and what's not working. Gorjana is an American jewelry designer based in Laguna Beach, California, who, alongside her husband, is redefining the contemporary jewelry space. Today, she chats with Keri Murphy to share her journey – from immigrating as a teen to the US from the former Yugoslavia to discovering her passion for jewelry design and launching her collection and fulfilling orders from their apartment floor to growing into a multi-million-dollar powerhouse.   Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here's How » Join the Inspired Living with Keri Murphy Community today: http://www.inspiredliving.tv/podcast LinkedIn Instagram Facebook YouTube

On this episode, it is my great pleasure to be speaking with award-winning, American Jewelry designer and Artist, Pamela Love. Her book Pamela Love: Muses and Manifestations, was published by Rizzoli New York in 2016Pam's Jewelry is inspired by astrology, her travels, astronomy, alchemy, botany, and folklore. She won the Ecco Domani Award in 2011, won the CFDA Lexus Eco Challenge for Sustainable Design in 2012, and in 2013 Won the CFDA Swarovski Award for Accessory Design.You have seen her work in countless music videos and on Television series. She is a favorite designer to many celebrities and music icons.We speak about her moving from Florida to NYC to attend the NYU Tisch School of the Arts to major in Film. Did you know she had originally wanted to be a production designer? We talk about her passion for film, how she began her journey with Jewelry design, and a new hobby of working with pottery. She shares her advice for new designers starting out today as well as her long term relationship with Francesco Clemente, who also officiated at her wedding and her love of music amongst many other surprises. Not to mention, her deeply candid honesty about her family history. She also happens to be one of my favorite cousins.Stay tuned, it's a special episode!You can find her designs here at:https://www.pamelalove.com

The Peoples Voice:  It’s been a little over 50 years since the Apollo missions carried men to the moon 12 men who walked on the moon the words one small step for man one giant leap for mankind spoken by Neil Armstrong as he planted his foot on the lunar surface. But what’s next we’re going to be talking about the new mission caring mankind to the moon again this will be a huge step the next program Intended to return man came to the moon in 2024.   The Success Factor:  What does it take to truly become successful. How have others done it and what sort of mindset does it require. Will be talking about success and focusing on a particularly successful individual today listen in and find out.   UNEDITED AI TRANSCRIPTION Kevin O’Leary  0:06 Hey, Wes, Chef wonderful here, I just want to do a really big shout out for you. I'm working today selling YB cakes on QC. But I have enough time to shout out for you because you have done something amazing. I love this whole idea of winning first place in the New York Book Festival. I love your new book, big things have small beginnings, which focuses on being the catalyst that delivers success. Of course, great ideas start small, but you have to really focus on them to make them happen. And I think that's a great theme West. I love everything about it. And you also made the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. How cool is that? So, you know, hats off to us. Keep up the good work, take care of my friend. Wes Berry  1:04  Welcome to the Wes Berry radio show. This is the people's voice segment. And I'd like to thank Mr. Wonderful for his very kind words. He's a great guy. Yeah, I don't know if you watch Shark Tank. But if you shouldn't, you really should watch it. It's a great show. We're here today with Ryan toll, my good friend. And we're going to be talking a little bit about the space program. And more importantly, it's you know, it's always important to celebrate things that have happened. But it's also critically important to be looking forward. And last week, the Apollo program celebrated its 50th anniversary of landing a man on the moon, and it landed two of them. Actually that day, on the 20th of July, Neil Armstrong with those famous words, one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. But you know, since the 70s, we just haven't been back there. And the question remains, what's the purpose? Where are we going? Why do we want to be there? Well, we've got to cut cut coming up in just a couple of minutes. It's going to talk about that Apollo 11 landing on the moon. But then it's also going to talk about the next stage the next step in the program. And that's that's really, it's, I believe, it's Artemis is what it's called. And Artemis is is the sister of Apollo, the sister of the Greek god, Apollo. And you know what's really interesting, she's also the goddess of hunters, which really, really pokes at me, because it's called the capsule and everything part of the system is called Orion, which is the hunter. Oh, that's interesting. So think about that. Yeah. So you've got the goddess of the hunt of the hunt. And you have the hunter, you know, most of you are probably familiar with a Ryan Ryan belt, you know, the three stars that are sort of in a crooked line in the sky, night sky. But it's I don't know whether or not NASA is trying to send us a message or not. But   Ryan Toll  3:10  they're not very smart Wes. I'm sure they have no veil meaning.   Wes Berry  3:14  You know, I'm sure they have so many men in there. I don't I don't know what they're planning on hunting. But I'm sure that the conspiracy theorists will soon unravel that,   Ryan Toll  3:23  you know, there's a lot of conspiracy theories speaking that believe we have not been to the moon that it was all done enough. Yeah. I don't believe that. I'm not I'm not advocating that.   Unknown Speaker  3:31  Yeah, but I do believe those are the same ones who do believe that the moon is made of cheese, very good, very well being specifically Swiss cheese, or Alsace Lorraine cheese, you know, that's a little bit smaller.   Unknown Speaker  3:43  comes from France. That's true. That's true.   Unknown Speaker  3:47  I forgot about that. But the problem here is not whether or not we should go back. But what's the mission? What is the reason? You know, the only reason Apollo the Apollo program was, was to put Flipboard sun the moon, you know, right,   Unknown Speaker  4:01  yeah, put a flag there, put some   Unknown Speaker  4:02  footprints there. Yeah, but we've got to have a more resoundingly reason to return the moon this time. And we are looking at going back, that the plan is for us to land on the moon by 2024. And I'm, I was very curious to see that that same program is supposedly going to be the one that's going to allow us to go to the moons of Mars, they've got this whole thing planned out. So let's go to that clip right now from NASA, about the Apollo program and where it's going now.   Unknown Speaker  4:37  50 years ago, we buy into the path to the trail we blazed cut through the fictions of science, and showed us all what was possible.   Unknown Speaker  4:50  Out here, today, our calling to explore is even greater.   Unknown Speaker  4:55  To go farther, we must be able to sustain missions of greater distance and duration, we must use the resources we find that our destinations, we must overcome radiation, isolation, gravity, and extreme environments like never before. These are the challenges we faced to push the bounds of humanity. We're going to the loo to stay by 2024. And this is how   Unknown Speaker  5:25  this all starts with the ability to get larger, heavier payloads off planet and beyond Earth's gravity. For this will design   Unknown Speaker  5:33  an entirely new rocket   Unknown Speaker  5:35  Space Launch System, SOS will be the most powerful rocket ever developed.   Unknown Speaker  5:39  And with components in production, and more in testing, this system is capable of being the catalyst for deep space missions, we need a capsule that can support humans from launch through deep space and return safely back to Earth. For this, we built   Unknown Speaker  5:57  a Ryan, this is NASA next generation human spaceflight capsule.   Unknown Speaker  6:02  Using data from lunar orbiters that continue to reveal the moon's hazards and resources, we're currently developing an entirely new approach to landing and operating on the moon, using our commercial partners to deliver science instruments and robotics to the surface, we're paving the way for human missions in 2024.   Unknown Speaker  6:21  Our charge is to go quickly   Unknown Speaker  6:24  to press our collective efforts forward with a fervor that will see us return to the moon in the manner that is wholly different than 50 years ago.   Unknown Speaker  6:35  You know, it's a big, it's a big, big step, it's a big thing to initiate. Right. Any thoughts on this? No, I think I think, you know, the, the there was this common view throughout the 70s. And, you know, even in my childhood, in the 80s, and so forth, that we would colonize the moon. And there's I dozens of movies made right about, about, you know, colonization, the moon and those colonies and and how that would move to Mars and so forth. So I think I think there's a lot of people are probably a little surprised that it hasn't happened yet. But that that that isn't the natural state of evolution from 50 years ago, from landing on the moon. Well, you know, so many people watch science fiction, and and they have a tendency to, to blur the lines between reality and and science fiction. And it is difficult, I'm sure that you could have made a wager 50 years ago, that we would be continuing to go to the moon. And you know, nobody would have taken that bet they would run sure that we were if it would have been the greatest bed of all times to say we wouldn't we wouldn't be back in 50 years. Right. But it's just hard to believe. But you know, it's that momentum. Sometimes, it takes a long time to make those, those those furthers step. Right. You know, you think about Christopher Columbus coming here to the new world and 1400 92 I don't think there were a lot of things settlements in 1400 93, you know, right, right, takes a while. But I'm very excited about this. I'm pleased that we're going back, please, that we have a reason to go back the scientific reason is something we're going to talk about a little bit later on. But this should really give a lot of energy to the whole process.   Unknown Speaker  8:20  I would agree. And I think, you know, I think that's the natural, you know, man has been an explorer, always right, whether it was to the next mile away or over the next mountain or whatever. And that is the next stage in our exploration or evolution, right is where else we can go within our galaxy. Sure. And you know, what got us   Unknown Speaker  8:37  into that. That position of landing on the moon was that we were in a competition. It was a space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. And that's what really really pushed it. You know what, we've got to go to a quick break now and we'll be right back.   Unknown Speaker  8:59  Some things in your mind medicine cabinet are more dangerous than others. When it comes to prescription drugs. opioid pain medicines can be addictive and even deadly. Half the people who misuse prescription pain medicines, get them from a friend or family member. Be part of the solution? Go through your medicine cabinet drawers anywhere you keep unused opioid pills, patches or syrup's? Find out how to dispose of them safely. Visit FDA. gov slash drug disposal. Hey, business owners, you can grow your small business into something big. Everyone starts somewhere. Big things have small beginnings is the best selling ebook by business expert West Berry. Learn how to build a $60 million international business from a $60,000 flower shop. Don't ignore the little things, build something big and turn your business into a huge success. Big things have small beginnings.   Unknown Speaker  10:02  Mason's among us, brought to you by Michigan Mason's   Unknown Speaker  10:05  nickname wise.   Unknown Speaker  10:07  He is an inventor, programmer and technology entrepreneur who co founded apple. He is known as pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 80s.   Unknown Speaker  10:16  And he single handedly developed the   Unknown Speaker  10:18  apple one, his name Steve Wozniak, a proud member of the Masonic fraternity,   Unknown Speaker  10:24  brotherhood fellowship community, be a mason go to We are the masons.org to find out more.   Unknown Speaker  10:34  We are this close to making history   Unknown Speaker  10:37  22 making history this close to changing this class, we are this close. This close this close to making history for this close to ending polio, to making sure no child suffers from this crippling disease ever again. All we need is you.   Unknown Speaker  11:13  Thank you for joining us. We're back. This is the people's voice segment of the West Berry radio show. And before I forget, I want to mention that my best selling book, big things have small beginnings is available on Amazon and other platforms. But it's probably easiest to get it there. It's a it's a great book. It's well it's got a Wall Street Journal bestseller on it and a USA Today best seller. So it's not just me and my mom, Tanya, it's a good book somebody else's to we're talking today about the new space program of returning to the moon. And I'm here with with Ryan tool. And I don't know, you know, Ryan, what do you think about this whole returning to the moon idea?   Unknown Speaker  11:57  Well, I think I think it's, you know, a good idea. I think there's a lot of technology that's coming to us from and I think we've talked previously about you know, that's, that's the space programs where Velcro came from, and the space programs where a lot of sustainable food ideas came from and freeze drying of food and so forth. And I think that the other piece to that, really and where I'm always looking for used is, I feel like there was this whole step out of that space program. We went away from the capsule away from that to the to the space shuttle for the you know, the 70s and 80s and 90s. Right. And now that program is scrapped, right? We're done with spit. And now we're back to if you looked at the pictures, the other video capsules, right. So   Unknown Speaker  12:30  it does look very, very familiar, doesn't it? Well, you know, that whole space shuttle program was a what's referred to as a low Earth orbit. Right. And we haven't we have not gone back to a distant orbit or a deeper space orbit since the Apollo program. You know, one of the things that I find a little bit curious about the new program, is that they they are it's a system, and they've got a plan that goes beyond just being able to get there. You know, the original space program is, as we mentioned earlier, was a space race between the former Soviet Union and us. And I think what really got us on our heels, is when China mentioned just a few years ago that they were going to Right, right, I agree with you. And you know, and I think I think the reason there wasn't a longer term plan and the original Space Race is your point. Right? It became well, we have to get there before the Russians, the Soviet Yeah. And, and so it didn't matter what we did to do that we were just going to get there first, it was equivalent to the race to Berlin was to get to the scientist should the race to Berlin at the end of World War Two, right, who that just showed your superiority? You know, that's a very good point. And on that subject. You know, after World War Two, the Nazi scientists that came to the United States under what was called Operation Paperclip, Verner von Braun was the guy and Verner von Braun was really I've got a chapter in my book about him actually about, about his personality type and about him. He was really a what you would refer to as a technocrat. He didn't really care who he was doing it for or why he was doing it. He just wanted to work his craft, like a technological mercenary, almost right, just whoever wanted to do it. And he invented the v1 and v2. Right? He did. He did. And actually, you know, there's I certainly don't, wouldn't say that this is the right way to say it, but that there were people who used to say that the United States didn't have a United States or an American space program. They had a German rocket program in the United States.   Unknown Speaker  14:37  I think that's that's factual. I mean, even the nuclear program, right was basically   Unknown Speaker  14:42  same rockets. Yeah. Yeah.   Unknown Speaker  14:42  You know, defected, you know, German scientists that defected. But   Unknown Speaker  14:46  right, German scientists. Well, the same rackets that were used in the space program were used in the ballistic missiles. Right, right. And, you know, the other thing that's kind of funny about this is in the Soviet Union, they had German scientists, too, right? Yeah. I guess it was a race to see who had that better German scientists. I don't know.   Unknown Speaker  15:03  Turns out we did, apparently,   Unknown Speaker  15:05  apparently, not many people realize that Verner von Braun was actually a major in the SS, which I didn't know that very difficult to believe sometimes. And for some reason, all photographs of him in that uniform form had been expunged.   Unknown Speaker  15:20  from us, we're anywhere it's almost like there was some clandestine act taking   Unknown Speaker  15:25  place. But if you actually read, you know, it, read the read the story, you know, and I'm not talking about reading some some conspiracy guy, but if you read his Wikipedia page, it'll tell you actually won't call my major is a different something, something group inferior, which is German for, you know, the same same pay grade as it would be over here, which would be an old for I guess, but at any rate, the point being, that it was so important to us to get to the moon and to enter to get control of that rocketry programs, that we were willing to do almost anything to accomplish that. And, you know, we've talked about this, and we've seen it in other situations, the whole computer age, I do not believe it could anywhere exist anywhere near the level that it exists. Now, without that Apollo program. I   Unknown Speaker  16:17  think you're absolutely right. And I think the, the acceptance by people of the world of the computer of technology, I think, was driven by that, you know, I, if you were to talk to some some, you know, older folks that were maybe alive during was, you know, there's a was a fundamental distrust of technology and its shareholders. Sure. And and I think that that is there's come a long way. Well, the reliability   Unknown Speaker  16:39  wasn't there, but the reliability had to be there. Because actually, you know, be the first Apollo craft had a monkey in it, right. And the monkey went up and came back down alive. Now that the Soviets, the dog, a dog, I'll think of his name, just as I leave here today. dog's name, I think it started with a P, but the dog didn't come back. No, they left them out there. They you know, so that was kind of a big difference between the American space program and   Unknown Speaker  17:10  the program. I think that's really that's the crux of the difference, right? Yeah. I think that we won the space race against some eyes that were pretty crazy, because I don't think they were also concerned that everybody they sent up came back to dogs, not a person, I get it. But there were no   Unknown Speaker  17:25  live broadcast, right, right of any Soviet rockets blasting off and no broadcasts of any failures either. So we had we had live fears that everybody got to watch. And and you're absolutely right. They had some advantages. But those same advantages are what gave us a better hand of cards.   Unknown Speaker  17:48  there who's still Is there anybody still alive? Do you know that was in the Apollo program? I'm thinking about it now. I mean,   Unknown Speaker  17:53  because it was all it is. And also Duke, I can't remember his first name, Duke, but actually a friend of mine, Danza who lived in West Bloomfield, the, the community that I grew up in, was actually actually in the Apollo program. And you know, he used to talk a lot about the Apollo 13 situation where they were having a hard time, right, okay. And he was really there. And he was a, he was recruited out of Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame, a real rocket scientist. Wow. So he was an interesting character. I haven't seen him in a long time. I, I know he moved out west. But he was also an avid Civil War historian. But at any rate, that and that, you know, that was something for me to get to meet somebody who was really there now, right? No, I, me I had I had met Alan Shepard at one point. But that was that was something to talk to him and just to pick his brain so to speak. But so what are we going to do, we've got to go back to the moon, we've got to make this work. And let's go to another clip that we have here. That will really help out help us to understand the new system that will allow us to travel to Mars and beyond.   Unknown Speaker  19:09  We want lunar lander is that are reusable, that can land anywhere on the lunar surface, the simplest way to do so is to give them a platform in orbit around the moon from which to transition,   Unknown Speaker  19:19  an orbiting platform to host Deep Space experiments and be a waypoint for human capsules. We call this lunar outpost gateway.   Unknown Speaker  19:28  The beauty of the gateway is that it can be moved between orbits,   Unknown Speaker  19:31  it will balance between the Earth and men's gravity   Unknown Speaker  19:34  in a position that is ideal for launching even deeper space missions. In 2009, we learned that the moon contains millions of tons of water ice,   Unknown Speaker  19:44  this is can be extracted, purify, for water, in a separate an auction for breeding for hydrogen for rocket fuel,   Unknown Speaker  19:50  the moon is quite uniquely suited to prepare as and propel us to Mars and beyond.   Unknown Speaker  19:57  This is what we're building. This   Unknown Speaker  20:00  we're training for.   Unknown Speaker  20:01  This we can replicate throughout the solar system. This is the next chapter of human space exploration.   Unknown Speaker  20:07  Humans are the most fragile element of this entire and, and yet we go for humanity. We go to the moon and onto Mars to seek knowledge and understanding and to share it with all we go knowing that our efforts will create opportunities that cannot be foreseen, we go because we are destined to explore and see it with our own eyes. We turn towards the moon now, not as a conclusion, but as preparation as a checkpoint toward all that lies beyond our greatest adventures remain ahead of us. We are going, we're going. We are going.   Unknown Speaker  20:48  Down. We're going.   Unknown Speaker  20:56  One of the things that I find very curious about this whole program. Is that whole gateway system. Yeah. So I have a prediction. And I haven't read this anywhere, but I'm willing to go out on a limb. But not too far out. You know, if you wanted to cross the desert, and you could only carry you know, like three gallons of water with you at a time. That's where you depots so you go out one gallon Berry one use the other one to get back, then you know, you have to depot your back and forth. And I would not be surprised at these gateway, maybe not for the first trip. But eventually, if we're actually going to be able to colonize Mars and it unless we're able to find some way to change the the laws of physics that we accept currently. Right? It's going to take a long time to get there and a lot of resources. So I think they're going to do it the same way across the desert. I think they're going to depot and I think they're going to depot, US utilizing this gateway type system.   Unknown Speaker  21:57  Well, I read a little bit before today that was talking about one of the one of the keys to this whole process is that that Elon Musk self landing rocket and you know, the SpaceX concept to do exactly that, right, they're going to send supplies ahead to Mars, and they're the Rockets going to go land. And when the astronauts do arrive, or cosmetics or whatever, you know, then they will go to those rockets. And they will retrieve the supplies because they can't carry enough supplies.   Unknown Speaker  22:23  And I agree with you. My thought is though that in addition to that we're going to need gas stations along the way,   Unknown Speaker  22:28  I think you're probably correct. And   Unknown Speaker  22:30  I wouldn't be surprised if that doesn't come about at some point. You know, it's interesting that you bring up Elon Musk, by the way, he's a very good publicist for himself, because NASA had NASA, Lockheed Martin, and actually vertically landed a rocket like five years before that, but they didn't do a press release. At any rate, aside from that, there is something that people should know, you know, the Freedom of Information Act, which allows us to have access to all the information that the government has, unless it's like national security, some special special stuff, and then it just gets a date on it when it'll get released. Right. That doesn't apply to private companies that we do that the government does business with. So any information that is held in by SpaceX trade secret, basically is that is not something that falls under the preview of the Freedom of Information Act. So hypothetically, they go to the moon, they find little green men, if Elon Musk's guys find it, we don't get to know if the United States government agency finds it, then we have to tell   Unknown Speaker  23:34  That's very interesting. I never thought about that last but I if one word conspiracy theorists, they would say that by using private companies, it gives a layer of protection.   Unknown Speaker  23:42  Well, it avoids the whole Freedom of Information Act thing. It's certainly like offshore banking. Right. You know, and I find that very curious that that is going on, to the extent that it is, I think it's a good thing, because anytime you get capitalism involved in it, anything and you you put in it, that there's some sort of monetary incentive that there's incentive pay, if you write for what you're getting done, all of a sudden, it's a huge multiplier, and a multiplier that the government can't usually provide very well. Right. Even if they decide to provide it, they don't seem to do right. But so, um, any more thoughts on this? Or   Unknown Speaker  24:23  how I think I think, you know, there's probably a lot of discussion to have, I think it's, it's exciting to me to think that, you know, in my children's lifetime, in the very near lifetime, assuming the 2024 day, they're going to get to see someone land on the moon that, you know, they'll have that to talk about, and I think I'm excited to see how that translates to your point into into moving farther on, whether it's to move out to the next way station along the way that gets us to Mars, or I think, you know, and I think that's sort of just exciting in our time, that's going to be the next bastion of exploration. Well,   Unknown Speaker  24:53  the whole idea that humanity needs to become a multi planet species. Is, is like, it's difficult, because just like back in the in the 70s, and late 60s, when this was going on with Apollo, there were a lot of people who thought it was a bad idea, because they want it to have those same funds utilized for things at home. Yeah, there was an interview that I was watching the other day from back then that somebody said, well, instead of going to the moon, why don't we you know, clean up New York, why don't we make it easier for people to get fed here? So there is this this innate desire in humanity to want to explore that, you know, what's around the corner, you know, what's what's over the hill, it's, it's, it's just in our nature. And it costs money   Unknown Speaker  25:44  aside, no use for it. So my wife sent me a text yesterday with a link to an article. There's an island. That's very, it's in the Pacific. And it's it's so isolated, that at most given times the people on the International Space Station are closer to them than anyone on Earth. Well, and, and but the point being that, that that isolation is is the hardest part of all of this, right? That's the that's the hardest part of space travel is sure, you know, yeah. Let's lock the three of us in a room and, you know, see how long we can stand each other before someone goes crazy.   Unknown Speaker  26:17  I don't have any problem with that, because I've gotten years where no one was willing to speak to, you know, so I'm sure that I would be able to handle it. Whether or not I would get any of the mission right or not. That's a whole nother thing. Right? Probably not probably why they wouldn't be speaking to me it would   Unknown Speaker  26:30  you go Let me ask you that question. Where's the near? Where would I go? Somebody called you up and said, West,   Unknown Speaker  26:33  there's a spot. This is a one way trip, though. Yeah. What one way? I don't know. I have to give it some serious consideration. Let me think about that. As as we're we're going to move to our next segment. But before we do, we're going to leave you with a few words from my favorite housewife from New York. Bethenny Frankel. She's also a guest on Shark Tank as one of the sharks from time to time. Let's hear what Bethany has to say about whatever she wants to say.   Unknown Speaker  27:07  Hi, Wes, congratulations, I hear you won first place in the New York Book Festival for your new book, big things have small beginnings, which is the truest thing I've heard all day. It focuses on being the catalyst delivering success. I'm all about it. Congratulations on making the Wall Street Journal, best sellers list. That's real accomplishment. Well, it's not as good of an accomplishment as getting your hair to be this wild. By doing nothing to it, hi, small say congratulations, but good for you. And big things are here for you. And you come from a place of Yes. And you are supported, you are loved. And you are going to have amazing success and good fortune and health and happiness and love and wealth in your life. So beyond the road, and look at all the signs and all roads lead to Rome. room are the big things. And wherever you are small beginning. So congrats with   Unknown Speaker  28:59  Hey, Wes, Chef, wonderful here, I just want to do a really big shout of you. I'm working today selling wine beef cakes on QZ. But I have enough time to shout out for you because you have done something amazing. I love this whole idea of winning first place and the New York Book Festival. I love your new book, big things have small beginnings, which focuses on being the catalyst that delivers success. Of course, great ideas start small, but you have to really focus on them to make them happen. And I think that's a great thing. Wes, I love everything about it. And you also made the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. How cool is that? You know, hats off to West Keep up the good work, take care of my friend.   Unknown Speaker  29:50  Glad you could join us. We're here with this success factor segment of the West Berry radio show. I don't want to forget to pitch my book. I gotta make sure I do that. Big have small beginnings. It's a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and I hope you'll consider picking up a copy. Well, thank you, Mr. Wonderful. And thank you, Bethany, for your kind words. Let's, we're going to focus a little bit on a different shark. Today we're going to talk about Lori Grenier, who is a really a remarkable business person. She's She's the principal in Q BC. She's also one of the sharks on Shark Tank. And she holds patents on over 100. And I'm 450 products note 120 products, I'm sorry, that she holds patents on. And she's created over 450 products that she sells through q BC and other sources. She's a true entrepreneur. And she's really someone that it's hard to. It's hard to get past her when when you start reading about her a little bit. Really a very accomplished woman.   Unknown Speaker  31:04  She's very impressive. I don't know if you ever watched her on Shark Tank at all. But I mean, I she's very engaging, and interesting, and she has a different take on it. And I think you know that QVC aspect I and you know, truth be told I've never bought anything NQ Vc, but she is intriguing. I feel like maybe she does have something I need to buy? Maybe I should watch NBC,   Unknown Speaker  31:22  you know, you're absolutely right. And she knows how to leverage her position. You know, we if you watch, you know, if you don't watch Shark Tank, you really should. It's a great show. And one of the things on Shark Tank when that she'll like leverage her abilities through q bc or through remarketing that maybe someone else won't have that on the show. And be able to, you know, get that little bit of an advantage sometimes and she's not. She's She's always happy to bring other other people in on a deal to   Unknown Speaker  31:49  get noticed that Yeah, she's she's not use the word greedy about it. But she's more than willing to partner up with somebody who thinks the right move. Absolutely.   Unknown Speaker  31:57  You know, I got a couple of quotes from her here. And I this one I really love. And I love this for a lot of reasons. First of all, I always sort of thought that I was in an optimist and I even belong to a club that's called an optimist. But she says, optimists, pessimist realist, why are you guys busy arguing about whether the glass is half full or half empty? Sincerely, I am an opportunist. She says, you know, that's, that's a heck of a way to think about it that, you know, may sound a little crass, or it may sound a little overbearing, but, you know, if you're going to make it, you have to be an opportunist, you have to be able to see opportunities and sees them.   Unknown Speaker  32:38  Yeah, no, absolutely. And, you know, I think, you know, I work in sales, right? Which is there's a super, there's a piece of that that's opportunistic, right, right. You have to you have to meet somebody needs Sure. Little little saying that I always tell people, right, whether you're optimistic about glass half full, half empty, I just think that glass might need some ice. Right. And that's, that's providing something that's and I think that that's, that's some of these real successful people that you're not worried about a glass walls half or half empty, they're worried about how they fill the rest of that glass and how that benefits what they want.   Unknown Speaker  33:05  And, you know, I think that's what she's she's talking about, you know, she, I think that really, perhaps, with instead of thinking about being an optimist about things, which is really positive thinking, which I really embrace, but that opportunists thing is just too critical to ignore. And what I really like about it, is that you get to see how she thinks when she does these shows. And another thing that she says is, I was fearless. I knew I would make it work. And that's the difference between successful entrepreneurs and peoples that don't get somewhere. It's the tenacity, it's the drive. You know, we used to call that stick to toughness. I don't think that's a real word. I think it's one that Alexander Haig made up, but it is it? I don't know, if I suppose tenacity is that is really the right word.   Unknown Speaker  34:03  I think you're absolutely right. And I could go on a whole tangent on Alexander Haig, but I won't. That guy was he's in charge. You know, he was he was chief executive for what self proclaimed, when we walk out of here later, I'm   Unknown Speaker  34:14  going to be I understand the only true coup that the United States has ever had pulled on. That's   Unknown Speaker  34:19  right. That's right. Now, but but really, I mean, I think I think I think you're absolutely right, though, you know, it's, it's what you see in success with these folks that all those books on success factor, and they're almost all self made, right? None of them. This is not a jab, none of them got this million dollar loan from their father, anything they their self made, guys, and gals. And but what you see in common is they have the ability to size up that situation. And they don't say it's going to work or not work. In fact, often they're like, yeah, this might work for you. I don't know that I can help you, you know, they have the ability to determine where they fit in and how that works. And sometimes you'll see him say, I, you know, Kevin, say, I can't help you. Maybe Lori can maybe she you know, I mean? Like sometimes we're and that just kind of shows their intelligence overall, right? That they, they like I can't, this isn't for me, but I think maybe she gets this. Well   Unknown Speaker  35:06  guess also, at the same time, when you're talking about venture capital investing in those sort of situations. The idea isn't so much as to pick a winner, as to pick something that can win big Yes. And if you pick 10 of them, and you put 100 grand in each, it's a million dollars, but if every one of them have the potential to pay off 100 fold. They I'm talking to you, then you're talking money. And you'll see a couple of Mark Cuban who we've talked about before Mark Cuban, I'll say that some of those folks, right is, hey, you're probably worth 500,000. And you might be able to pay me back 10% a year, I don't want to I don't want the investment that's given me 10% of your I want it's given me 40 or 50, or whatever. So I'm not saying you're broken. I'm saying you don't work for me. You know, I was in a in a conversation at one time with someone who was talking to me about, well, when you were scaling your business? What percentage of growth Did you plan for each year? And I'm like, Oh, my God, this guy doesn't get it. You know, if you're starting off, like I was starting off at $60,000, and you have 100% growth every year, you're never going to get to see a million dollars in my lifetime. And an interesting point about that, is that, yes, you have to have goals. But your goals have to be lofty enough to really make things happen.   Unknown Speaker  36:24  Right? Well, and I think though that's that's why private sector so important. And that's why that's why small business is so important by So look, I you know, it's no secret, I work for some I live and die by a budget, right? That's what I have to do. And so if I have to grow by 10%, my goal is to grow by 10%. It's you know, and in fact, I've worked for companies in the past where if you were growing more than that, they would say, Whoa, slow down, you're going to make this number for this year, you need to you need to save some of that for next year's number I see. Whereas words, you know, an entrepreneurial perspective for yourself. It would make a lot of sense to just   Unknown Speaker  36:54  get it, get it I understand. We're going to go to a clip from Lori, that I think really helps us to to understand who she is better. Go with that clip, please.   Unknown Speaker  37:05  If we just believe we have to be driven, you have to be motivated, you have to have passion.   Unknown Speaker  37:14  If I have an obstacle, I go over it, I go under it.   Unknown Speaker  37:19  You just don't quit waiting for   Unknown Speaker  37:25  glory actually reigns over a multimillion dollar Empire. And it all started with a jewelry organizer over half a   Unknown Speaker  37:31  million of these spoken for. She's one of the most prolific inventors of our time with over 120 patents to her name and has grossed over a half a billion in sales. Would you buy this? Do you like it? Would you need it? And what would you pay for it?   Unknown Speaker  37:43  She's a serial entrepreneur and has kept expanding her brand. Despite the difficult economy. I can tell instantly if it's a hero, or a zero sees the warm hearted shark on the hit show shark tank and has been crowned the Queen   Unknown Speaker  37:56  of QVC. The most successful Shark Tank item to date, I'll make you a millionaire within a year.   Unknown Speaker  38:04  What is Lori, a shark tank, I knew she would be the right partner.   Unknown Speaker  38:07  This is the best sponge in the world. And I've got to bring it to all of you at QVC. To be a good business person, you must be decisive. You could have PVC Bed, Bath and Beyond target all the different retailers. You could have your online you could go to insurance, shark do it all. We all do it but I will do it the best. I know from 17 years of experience, what's going to work on the market.   Unknown Speaker  38:33  Please welcome the author of invent it, sell it back it   Unknown Speaker  38:39  so much great advice. You've really   Unknown Speaker  38:41  covered it all. In this book,   Unknown Speaker  38:43  you learn how to do exactly what I did. You learn how to take a product from concept to creation, from marketing to manufacturing, packaging, patenting. Everything is in there step by step,   Unknown Speaker  38:54  everything that Lori touches is gold went over $8 million.   Unknown Speaker  39:00  Lauren has made me really busy. She's made me   Unknown Speaker  39:03  pretty wealthy, such a great partner, such a great mentor.   Unknown Speaker  39:05  I'm very happy to be here tonight with all of you, I love speaking to people because I can feel them getting excited, their mind spinning saying I can do it, I can do something to I'm inspired by people that love to make things happen. I'm not just business driven. I'm a true real person who has a heart. I've always felt that if you're lucky enough to be successful, you have an obligation to give back. greatness to me is achieving something that makes you happy and has a profound impact on the world. You can make anything happen in my life, there are no knows just how can I   Unknown Speaker  39:48  now that somebody who you can use as a role model, I'll tell you absolutely, she's definitely the sort of person that that you can see that she has enthusiasm, and she has the drive. And she has the determination to be successful at what she does. It's amazing to me that she's been in your neighbor in your living room, in your house on TV. And we all feel as though we know her a little bit. But I think that there's an awful lot more to know about her. And one of the things that I found very, very curious was how she positions herself in the market. She's in sort of a vertical position, because she has the retail part of it, right. And she has the development of it. And she has the venture capital to create things. So she's carrying it all the way through. Lots of people that start a business are looking to sell something that's already on the market. This is a this is a person who they sell things that are in the market, but she goes out and tries to find things that people should want, will want. And then she's able to deliver that. And in many cases, she's creating it. What what a marvelous individual. And that whole vertical integration is something that a lot of people miss. It allows for scalability. And that's one of the things that Lori has accomplished is that her business model allows it to scale. Right? If you know, if you're going to mow lawns, and that's in you're going to you want to you want to build a million dollar business, you're gonna have a very hard time doing that. Because it's really not scalable to that. Right. Right. And it may pay a better living for you at that age in your life. And when you and it, you know, in a small way, but somebody who's really looking to build something scalable, has to be willing to take it on the chin for a few years. And then get it long   Unknown Speaker  41:58  risk is such a big part of that right there. That old saying no one ever no one ever got rich working for someone else. And no one ever got rich without taking a risk. Right. And I think those are probably very factual statements. Right? That that's it. Although I guess the people that work for like General Motors is the CEO, they might have gotten rich.   Unknown Speaker  42:14  She's kind of a machine created, though, right? That does this. She recruits she develops, she manufactures. She retails she benefits. That's, that's like, holy cow. She's got the whole thing.   Unknown Speaker  42:32  Why? And I gotta tell you, I think it goes back to have you I'm sure you've done this, I've done this where I've, I thought, Hey, you know, I should, I wish there was a product that did x, whatever it is right? And you think about it, you think about it, you kind of design in your head, but then you never do anything about it. And then all of a sudden you see   Unknown Speaker  42:48  it on the shelf and you go, I could have invented that.   Unknown Speaker  42:50  I hear you. I hear you. We're going to go to a quick break now. And here are a few words about a few things.   Unknown Speaker  43:00  Hey, business owners, you can grow your small business into something big. Everyone starts somewhere. Big things have small beginnings is the best selling ebook by business expert West Berry. Learn how to build a $60 million international business from a $60,000 flower shop. Don't ignore the little things, build something big and turn your business into a huge success. Big things have small beginnings.   Unknown Speaker  43:35  A legendary golfer, used to say that it didn't bother him when he would have a bad shot because he expected to have a few bad shots every round. And every time he'd have a bad shot. He was thankful because he got the bad shot out of the way. That's the way you got to think about it and not let yourself be overwhelmed by setbacks.   Unknown Speaker  44:04  optimists volunteers contribute time and money to programs that inspire and bring out the best in kids. optimist give leadership guidance and hands on involvement to activities that shape young people's eyes. optimists help form positive attitudes and kids and optimists creating opportunities for you as they develop into adulthood and become role models for future generations. optimists are doing all these things right here, right now.   Unknown Speaker  44:34  Because of Shriners hospitals for children, I can play basketball.   Unknown Speaker  44:49  I can write my name. That's Shriners hospitals for children.   Unknown Speaker  44:53  Love is caring for a child, regardless of the family's ability to pay. If you no child, we can help visit Shriners hospitals for children.org.   Unknown Speaker  45:15  Welcome back, this is the success factor. And this is Wesley Berry. I'm here with Ryan toll. And we're talking about a really a wonderful person. Lori Grenier, who is a she's on Shark Tank, she runs q BC, she's done over a half a billion dollars in sales. And I probably shouldn't go into this because it'll sound as though I'm trying to trying to pat myself on the back. But I do that pretty regularly. So I guess I shouldn't be worried about that. When I heard that, that line in there, and I researched a little bit. She was talking about things that she sold her through her own business from that through Creek, UBC, you know, over a period of time. So I went back to and I ended up how much I had done all together while I was in business. And I came up with over 750 million dollars in sales. And I never thought of pitching it that way. But I must say that that you know, Lori, she's got it figured out. She knows how to how to package?   Unknown Speaker  46:17  Yeah, no, I think that's smart. They might want to put that on the front of your book. Yeah, maybe this next?   Unknown Speaker  46:24  Throw it on there.   Unknown Speaker  46:25  Yeah, I hadn't thought about that one until I read that. So you need to pay your own way in the world. That's a line that she likes to use frequently. And I that's, that sounds simple and sounds True enough. But it's not always easy. If you want to really have the opportunity to enjoy success and to succeed, you really do need to understand what that means. And that means you either be need to be in a business, that you're able to develop your own book of business, so to speak, or your own relationships, and that you're going to be rewarded for those relationships and for maintaining them. Or you need to be going out there and starting your own business. You said it earlier. You may you may get well off, but you it's really hard to get rich working for someone else. Right. And that's that's a key thing to understand. true that there used to be those that saying it was it was actually about Michael Jordan, right. Michael Jordan's rich, but the guy who signs Michael Jordan's check is wealthy. Right? I mean, that's the best difference. Right? Exactly. Exactly. It she's, she's got it under control, and she's got it going on. One of the other things that she likes to say is, the big thing for me is, I never think about myself as a female in business. I'm a person in business. You know, I hate to say this, but you know, society has, for a long time brought women up to believe that that they were not necessarily the the one we're going out there making the biggest difference, you know, and and that's not right. And she's not letting that hinder her. In other words, she's not making excuses. Because that's all it would be for what she's able to do or not able to do. Yeah, you know, it's like the guy who says, Oh, you know, I can't do that. I don't I don't have a college degree. Well, you know what? That's just an excuse, right? Get started, you know, if you're not going to get started, then you're definitely not going to be able to do it. Right. But if you get started, at least you have a chance. I mean, what the heck,   Unknown Speaker  48:31  yeah, yeah, you're never you're never going to get to an outcome. If you don't, if you don't start?   Unknown Speaker  48:34  Well, for sure. But that's a real big problem. You know, I I like to say that fear has prevented more success than failure has. And, you know, when you think about that, you think about just like you were talking about earlier, about, you have an idea about a product, you know, or something that you would wish you had. And then the next thing, you know, it comes out, it actually happens, sometimes things are different, at the same time in different areas. And that's simultaneous discovery. And that's when society's needs and the components that exist, are in play at the same time, and someone recognizes that opportunity idea. So they recognize that and it can be two different companies and different parts of the country, or they can be across the street from each other. And they come to a realization that, you know, we need a better mousetrap. And they start working on it. And and then they look at the technology that's available to build a better mousetrap, right. And the technology that's out there from which they draw on may lead them to almost the same type of conclusion. And that's it simultaneous discovery, right. And you and I had a discussion before,   Unknown Speaker  49:45  off air, just you know, in their personal life, but one of the you were you were giving some advice to somebody, but one of the things you said was, Hey, you know, if you want to become a millionaire, then you should probably hang out with people are millionaires, because that's their they're emulating them is going to get you there. If you want to be a millionaire, but you choose to hang out with a bunch of people that are hanging out at a bar, you're going to end up being the guy that hangs out at the bar, not a millionaire.   Unknown Speaker  50:03  There's a lot of people who who have said it in different ways that you're a reflection of the five closest friends, or this or that or whatever it is, but I'll take it a step further. Absolutely, it if you want to succeed, you need to hang around people who know how to succeed. But you don't have to hang around them physically. Just if you are willing to make a leap and say, all right, I need a mentor. To get where I need to be. Okay, I'm going to read about a mentor. And you know that when you read a book about somebody, or about what they did, you can relate to them, you start thinking about how they did things, you know, when you read a book about Howard Hughes, right. And you understand a little bit about how he was thinking and why he was doing what he was doing in order to accomplish things. And reading Lori's book, I think would be a great idea. And especially for anyone who give it to someone who's been making excuses. Give it to someone who's been making excuses. If you don't need the book yourself, give it to someone who's been making excuses for not being there. You know, entrepreneurship is the way we take control of our lives in a tough economy. That that's Laurie Laurie talking there. That's how she thinks. And you know what, there are times in a tough economy where you can grow a business faster. Okay, I have a I know a guy who was a congressman. And during the tough economy, his his business pivoted to foreclosures. He made a fortune in foreclosures. He was only he only did okay as an attorney before that, right. And then when he you know, then all of a sudden he was he was a, you know, a jackpot winner, right? So you've got to be willing to look at those opportunities. We're going to go to a quick segment here with just a couple of little little spots about once about an optimist.   Unknown Speaker  51:57  optimists volunteers contribute time money to programs that inspire and bring out the best in kids. optimist give leadership guidance and hands on involvement to activities that shape young people's eyes. optimists help form positive attitudes and kids. And optimists create opportunities for youth as they develop into adulthood and become role models for future generations. optimists are doing all these things right here, right now.   Unknown Speaker  52:30  This is Brad Paisley, how does it good more become a good man. same ole believes that it takes good friends, good activities and good role models. The Malaya is the only nonprofit youth organization where young men decide on the activities planned them and carry them out. But it takes adult volunteers to be the role models that steer them in the right direction. a celebrity isn't necessarily a role model, role model is a caring concerned adult like you to learn more, call one 800 DMOLAY or visit them on the web at DM live.org.   Unknown Speaker  53:13  Welcome back. I'm glad that you're still with us. And we've only got a couple minutes left. Ryan, any thoughts about Lori or about? You know about her her expertise or anything? No,   Unknown Speaker  53:24  I think you know, I was thinking about the number of patents she said she had 120 and I think the average cost to get a patent is like $10,000 probably so I mean just she's got you know, millions of dollars in patents, you know, they weren't making money now. It happens that they are yeah, oh yeah.   Unknown Speaker  53:39  I wear jewelry box before though that the whole photo ID I didn't see it until you watch the video. But I seen that places before. You know, I hate to do this. But I think the same that should go with this. When you talk about this. She started with that. Just making a jewelry box. And then she created to BC, is that big things have small beginnings. I don't know. But I think it would be a great named for a book if somebody wanted to write a book. But she started she actually went in the garage and built that first jewelry box prototype herself, she used her dad's workshop, woodworking shop and created it. And she created it, it's it was it's a sort of a different kind of jewelry box it it has a lot of different holding mechanisms that you wouldn't ordinarily have. And it was just her putting her creative thoughts into it and developing it so that it would would be able to satisfy those sort of needs, right. And she sold a boatload of them right out of the shoot. So you don't have to have some big venture capital guy or some big investment or whatever to write your business go. She went out in the garage took a piece of hardwood and started bits fit fiddling with it till she made what she wanted to make.   Unknown Speaker  54:53  Yeah, I have a buddy who built a pole a solar pool heater. Just he had an idea and he went and kept the hardware store and kept by in parts and and it's your his patented now and he sells it and Walmart's buying and whatever. But through exactly that same. He just decided off of off of picking up a garden hose that was given up some hot water. We've all done that. Right? He went Hey, how do I harness this? Instead of paying $1,000 a month? You're cool.   Unknown Speaker  55:16  Hey, but that's what you know, the difference between your friend and most people is they had that idea, but then they don't do anything. Right. Right. You know, there's an old expression that I always love. And and I i Reese restated in a little bit more friendly way. But that is that   Unknown Speaker  55:40  a good idea?   Unknown Speaker  55:42  poorly executed is a failure. Yeah.   Unknown Speaker  55:46  But a, an average idea. well executed is a success. And what does that mean? It means that it's more about the doing even than the idea. I honestly believe there's no bad ideas. It's the execution. That's the blame. Somebody told me once                                 Unknown Speaker  56:03  well done is better than Well said.   Unknown Speaker  56:05  Right? Absolutely. We're going to go to one last clip as we close out the show. And this is from a good friend of mine. His he's a pawnbroker. His name is less gold from hardcore pawn. And when your name is less gold, I guess you belong in the pawn business. You know, I mean, it's like a birthright. Let's go to that clip as we leave today, and I hope to hear from you and see you next week.   Unknown Speaker  56:31  They watch this is let's go from hardcore pawn, and American Jewelry and Loan, giving you a big shout out all the way from Detroit. You know, I know it's not easy writing a book. As a matter of fact, I wrote a book for what it's worth, business wisdom from a pawnbroker A few years ago, which I was fortunate enough to make the New York Times bestseller list. And I want to congratulate you and winning first place in the New York Book Festival for your new book. You know, it's not easy doing a book like I said, so I give you a lot of accolades and wish you the best of luck in the future. You know, and also our   Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Bill Hougart whose books on Native American Silversmith's and Mexican jewelry hallmarks are the gold standard for the industry. If you want to understand how Native American signatures on their jewelry started and the different types and dates of when these hallmarks began, this is a must listen to podcast.

Fortunoff Jewelry is one of the largest American Jewelry retailers recognized as a New York institution. Tune into this episode of Hilary Topper On Air as Hilary interviews Esther Fortunoff, President of Fortunoff Jewelry, now an e-commerce site as well as a retailer on Long Island, which features a finely curated selection of jewelry for women, children and men. Learn how Fortunoff quickly grew to become an iconic brand noted for quality, selection, service and value. Discover how the brand distinguishes itself with unique designs of fine jewelry from classics to trendy and modern, and hear how Fortunoff Jewelry became the go-to destination for purchases to mark special occasions.  The post The Rise of Fortunoff Jewelry appeared first on Hilary Topper On Air.

Seth Gold of the Hard Core Pawn reality TV show is interviewed by David Cogan of Eliances Heroes show on Money Radio amfm. They discuss the pawn industry and how Gold came to be involved in the family business. Gold also is the host of his own Goldtone podcast on which David Cogan was previously interviewed by him and his father Les Gold, owner of American Jewelry and Pawn in Detroit Michigan.

Les Gold of Hard Core Pawn reality tv series and owner American Jewelry and Loan in Detroit is interviewed by David Cogan of Eliances Heroes show on Money Radio am&fm.

Les Gold is an old school pawnbroker at heart, with a passion for collecting and a nose for deals and people. Known worldwide through his TruTV show, Hardcore Pawn, he authored the bestselling For What It’s Worth: Business Wisdom from a Pawnbroker. Les built American Jewelry and Loan from the ground up. From early childhood, Les had a sharp eye for spotting opportunities and finding ways of doing things better. Whether he was leveraging his pizza, selling it by the slice, brokering a better deal or adding new services, his lifelong drive has been a passion for improvement and productivity.

Today I have the mac daddy of pawn brokers on the show, Les Gold. His Detroit pawn shop - American Jewelry & Loan · is the famous scene of the hit of the hit TV reality show, Hardcore Pawn, which is in its 9th season!   Well, the show premiered in 2010 delivering to an unprecedented 2 million viewers and setting a record as truTV's most-watched series premiere ever. This success has catapulted Les into speaking engagements, sales training seminars, and even a recent TED talk.   Les is known for his practical negotiating tips, which are often the topic of his media appearances including: Yahoo! Finance where I interviewed him about a year ago, Good Morning America, CNN, and Forbes.   Three takeaways from this interview: Les' philosophy that "There's a customer for anything, the most important thing when you're trying to negotiate and why making mistakes doesn't make you a failure!  For the full transcript visit SoMoneyPodcast.com