Podcasts about gijs bakker

What you'll learn in this episode: How Cindi helped the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston secure one of the country's most important art jewelry collections  Why jewelry is a hybrid of craft and art that doesn't fit just in one category Why the art world began to question the value of craft in the 80s, and why that perspective is changing now Why museum and gallery visitors shouldn't ask themselves, “Would I wear this?” when looking at art jewelry 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 Transcript: For the uninitiated, jewelry, art and craft may seem like three distinct (and perhaps, unfortunately, hierarchical) entities. But Cindi Strauss, Curator of Decorative Arts, Crafts and Design at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, wants us to break down these barriers and appreciate the value of jewelry as an art in its own right. She joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about how she helped MFA Houston establish one of the largest art jewelry collections at an American museum; why jewelry artists should be proud of their studio craft roots; and why wearability shouldn't be the first consideration when looking at art jewelry. 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, our guest is Cindi Strauss, the Sara and Bill Morgan Curator of Decorative Arts, Crafts and Design at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, where she's been responsible for a number of exhibits and has written extensively. She coauthored the recent book “Influx: American Jewelry and the Counterculture.” In addition, she's on the Board of Directors of Art Jewelry Forum. We'll hear more about her jewelry journey today. Cindi, welcome to the program.   Cindi: Thank you, Sharon. I'm delighted to be here.   Sharon: So glad to have you. Tell us about your jewelry journey. Did you like jewelry, or did you come to it through decorative arts? How did that work?   Cindi: Well, the story has been heard. I have told it before, about how I was introduced to art jewelry through Helen Drutt through a serendipitous meeting with her. Prior to that, we only had one piece of art jewelry in the museum's collection, a terrific Art Smith necklace from 1948. Personally, I come from a family who loves jewelry, but I have not been as much of a lover of it. I have always worn very minimal jewelry myself, so it's sort of ironic that I am the curator of this phenomenal jewelry collection, the foundation of which is the acquisition in 2002 of Helen Drutt's private collection. At that time, we acquired a little over 800 pieces, including sketchbooks and some drawings of international art jewelry dating from about 1963 to, at that point, the early 2000s. Helen continued to add to that collection up through 2006, when we were in the final preparation for the Ornamentist art exhibition and catalogue. That opened in 2007 in Houston and traveled to Washington, D.C., to Charlotte, North Carolina, and then to Tacoma, Washington. That is, from a publications point, a great point of demarcation in terms of art jewelry collections. Since then, not only has Helen continued to add pieces to the museum, but we have worked with a lot of national and local collectors, and our jewelry collection continues to grow through acquisitions and gifts.    I would say that in graduate school, I had the barest introduction to jewelry, and it was really historical jewelry as part of a larger decorative arts education, in terms of looking at styles and how they reflected themselves in historical jewelry. At the time I was in graduate school at the Cooper Hewitt, there was not a seminar on contemporary art jewelry or art jewelry in general, so my knowledge of it has really been built and continues to be built based on our collection, our commitment to it going forward, and trying to keep up with the bare minimum of what's been happening in the field. I have to say Art Jewelry Forum is an amazing way for me to do that through their website, through the articles, through the artist awards, through the artist maker pages. It's a very easy snapshot of what's happening in the field, and then I can take that research and interest into other directions.   Sharon: I can't imagine being an aficionado, whether it's to study or just being a jewelry lover, and not being involved in Art Jewelry Forum. There's no other place like it.    Cindi: There isn't. Honestly, nine times out of 10, if I am interested in learning more about an artist and I plug in the artist's name in Google, the first search that comes up is always Art Jewelry Forum. It's either an interview or an article or something. For me, it has always been a one-stop initial research location.   Sharon: How did you come to study decorative arts? How did you become a professional in the area? Was that something you had always wanted to do? What was your training?   Cindi: It really happened, I would say, serendipitously. I grew up in a family where my father was in the design field, particularly in textiles. My parents' preferred style was that of Scandinavia and Italian modern. I grew up in a contemporary house, so there was a certain amount of osmosis with this field. I grew up in Connecticut, which is more oriented towards colonial architecture and traditional interiors, and I knew our house was different and it kind of stuck out. I remember asking my parents when I was young why our house didn't look like everybody else's, and their answer was very simple: because this is what we like, and this is why we like it.   I went off to college and thought I was going to be an English major. I took an intro to art history survey and found I loved it, but it wasn't until my senior year in college that a survey of the history of decorative arts was offered, and that completely ignited my fire. As much as I loved art history, I wanted to be able to touch paintings, which I can't do. I was interested in the tactile qualities of art and texture and being able to feel and understand value. This introduction to the history of decorative arts was my gateway. That ignited a passion not only for the decorative arts, but when I was going to the museums and such during that time, I started to pay attention to decorative arts galleries more than I had in my museum billing previously. I thought, “This is what I want to do; this is where I want to be. I want to be in a museum and I want to be doing decorative arts.”   My first year out of college, I had an academic year fellowship at the Met. It was in a subset of the registrar's office called the cataloguing department, and that gave me a bird's eye, in-depth view of what was happening at the Met. At that time, I knew I was going to have go to graduate school, and I learned about Cooper Hewitt's program in the history of decorative arts. At that point, I chose Cooper Hewitt. There was no graduate center yet, and I knew I didn't want to do early American decorative arts. I wanted to have a broader art education, so I went to Cooper Hewitt. Interestingly, my thesis and a large chunk of my classes were on 18th-century European art, particularly porcelain, and I thought I would spend my career there because that's where all the research was happening. With the exception of design museums or modern art museums like MOMA, a lot of the big, encyclopedic institutions were not really paying attention to decorative arts beyond the Arts and Crafts movement. But I took as many classes as I could in 20th-century design and took decorative arts because that was what my personal passion was.   I got lucky, because my first position after graduate school was curatorial assistant here in Houston. I was split between two departments, the decorative arts department and our not-yet-opened house museum, Rienzi. It was the perfect job for me because Rienzi was all about the 18th century, whereas the decorative arts department was just starting to move past the Arts and Crafts movement into modern and contemporary. Ultimately, I was able to determine the pathway for that and create a separate department, and I made my way out of the 18th century to focus completely on the 20th and 21st centuries. So, it was a pathway of following my heart and my curiosity within this larger field.   Sharon: What were your thoughts when you were presented with this 800+ piece collection by Helen Drutt and they said, “O.K., put this exhibit together”?   Cindi: First of all, it was completely daunting. Anyone who knows Helen knows her knowledge is so vast, and she is so generous with it, but at the beginning, it's all brand new. So, it's rather intimidating, and you're doing so much looking and listening. In my initial conversations with Helen about the possibility of this acquisition, it was focused on the “Jewelry of Our Time” catalogue that she had cowritten, which featured a lot of the collection. There was a lot of study of that, trying to get myself up to speed to even make the presentations for the acquisition to not only my director, but our trustees.    It's funny; I have my initial notebooks from my first visit to Philadelphia with Helen, where I spent a number of days just sitting next to her as she held up different pieces, talked about different people, gave insight. Because I didn't know anything about the field—all the artists' names are spelled phonetically—there are a lot of notes to myself saying, “What does this really mean?” or a question mark with “follow up” or something like that, and I was drawing. I think I had a cell phone, but there was no cell phone camera. I didn't have an iPhone or iPad. I don't even know if they existed in 2002, but I would draw little pictures next to something she was talking about. Anyone who knows me knows I am quite possibly the world's worst draftsperson, so the pictures are hilarious. But I go back to those notebooks periodically, and you can see how I am intent on wrapping my head around this and trying to understand which countries, who were the major players, where things had gone.   We built a library at the museum with Helen's help. She seeded our library intending to send books. We were ordering catalogues nonstop, and I spent the better part of four years immersing myself in art jewelry and talking to artists. At that point, it was all done through these forms we would mail to artists. I tried to meet artists, and Helen's archives with all the correspondence were an incredible resource. There were interviews with artists and things like that. I would travel to the American Craft Council to see their incredible library and artist archive. I would do all of this plus travel to meet artists. I did a number of trips to Europe and across the U.S., trying to get my head around this field as seen through Helen's collection. The collection represents not only her eye and experiences and viewpoint, but truly the birth and development of the field over decades, not just in America, but globally as well.   Sharon: What's her connection to Houston? How is it she came to your museum?   Cindi: She didn't have any real connection to Houston. At the time, her son, Matthew, was the Chief Curator of the Manil Collection, which is a terrific, incredible museum here in Houston. She also had a very close and longstanding friendship with our then-photography curator, Anne Tucker. They met in a cute way over a slide table at Moore College of Art in the 70s, when they were both teaching there.    We have a festival every other year in Houston called FotoFest. It's one of the U.S.'s largest photography festivals, and all the institutions do exhibitions for FotoFest and their popup shows and galleries. The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft was only a year old at that point, but through connections, they met Helen. She curated a small show of photo-based, image-based jewelry for FotoFest, so of course she came down, and that's where I met her.    I met her at the opening. We had coffee separately during her visit. I was really ramping up our craft collection in terms of acquisitions and representation. As I said, we only had this one piece of art jewelry. I knew enough about what I didn't know to say to Helen at the time, “This is a field I'm interested in starting to acquire works from. Would you guide me?” She pointed me towards the “Jewelry of Our Time” catalogue and said, “Well, you know I have a collection.” I, of course, said, “Well, yes, it's famous, and it's in Philadelphia. It's so lucky they're going to get it.” She said, “Not necessarily. Nothing's been done. There's nothing in writing.” I seized on that and said, “Well, will you provide me with more information, and may I speak to my director about this?” She said, “Sure.”    It was, at the time, sort of a lark. I thought, “I don't know whether this will happen,” because it was not a field we were familiar with and certainly my director, Peter Marzio, was not familiar with it. I showed him the book. I talked to him with my little knowledge. He was intrigued, because he saw in it what he referred to as a “visual index” of modern and contemporary art in small scale. He saw all the connections and the creativity, and he said, “I'd like to learn more.” I arranged for him to go to Philadelphia, where he spent half a day with Helen and they talked and looked at pieces. He came back and said to me, “I want to figure this out. I want to do this,” and the rest is history.   Sharon: Wow! It's funny; when you were saying you were spelling things phonetically, I thought of Gijs Bakker. That's the name that came to mind. For people listening, it's G-i-l-s-b—   Cindi: G-i-j-s B-a-k-k-er. Gijs is one of the most important Dutch jewelry artists. He, along with his late wife, Emmy van Leersum, completely turned the idea of art jewelry on its head in the 60s. He and a number of other Dutch artists in the 60s and 70s revolutionized the field. Helen was such a great supporter, and he's one of her dearest friends. We have something like 34 or 35 of his pieces in the collection, not just from Helen, but from a couple of others that we've added along the way. I think outside of the Netherlands, we have the largest collection of Gijs' work.   Sharon: Wow! My first Art Jewelry Forum trip was to Amsterdam. I had just come to art jewelry myself, and his studio and his house were the first stop. When I think about it now, I think, “Oh, my god!” I had no idea. At the time, I didn't know which way was up when it came to art jewelry.   Cindi: I think that is a lot of people's first experience. It's visually compelling, and then you start to learn more. Quite often, you realize after the fact you met one of these super-important people, or you were in their studio or what have you.    Sharon: Yeah, it really is. I'm backing up a little. When you were studying, were there museums studies? Did you expect to be working in a museum or to be a curator? Was that part of your career field?    Cindi: Yeah, I always wanted to work in a museum, and I wanted to work in a curatorial capacity. The Cooper Hewitt's program at that time was geared towards museum curatorial careers. Also, a lot of people went into education. It was not geared towards working in the commercial sector. There were a handful of people who might have gone to an auction house or to a gallery, but it was focused on developing museum curators. That was something I knew I wanted and was really important to me in terms of being at the Cooper Hewitt. The program is embedded in the museum physically and has a lot of faculty from the museum and also, during my time, a lot of faculty from the Met, from the Brooklyn Museum. We had people teaching from MFA Boston, from Winterthur.    It was very much a program equally based on not only research and history and study, but on connoisseurship. Connoisseurship is essential to being a museum curator. You need to be able to delineate and understand the differences between different objects made by the same designer as well as within any larger aspect of the field. Cooper Hewitt was very much geared towards that, which was perfect for me. Because we were in the museum and we had faculty from other New York area museums, it was also possible to have internships with prominent curators from the various museums, again, moving you through this curatorial path.    The trick is always getting a job, and for me that was a lot of luck, I think. When I was in my second year, my last year of graduate school, I was working as an intern for one of the premier curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, particularly in late 19th-century ceramics and glass but also furniture. Her co-curator on an upcoming exhibition was my future boss at Houston. There was a job opening. Katherine Howe sent a fax, at that time, of the job description, and she handed it to me and said, “I know you still have a semester to go, but here, take a look at it.” I thought, “Well, I need to get a résumé in order. I need to start thinking about this.” I applied not thinking anything other than this is good exercise, and it obviously worked out for me.    I think in my graduating class from Cooper Hewitt—I think there were about 15 of us—there were only three of us who actually got museum jobs. A lot of it is timing because positions come open so rarely. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one from my graduating class left in a museum. It's not for everybody, and there aren't always jobs, but it was all I ever wanted to do. I also only wanted to work in a big institution, so Houston fit the bill for me. I love doing what I do within an encyclopedic institution, being able to contextualize, in this case, art jewelry, whether it's historical works of art, the idea of adornment, showing it within a particular geographical context. We exhibit the jewelry not only on its own and with other contemporary craft and design, but we exhibit it next to painting, sculpture, photography, works on paper. We embed it, and that is something my colleagues are very much used to and see it as being a vital art form.   Sharon: 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.

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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: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. Today, my guests are Susan Cummins and Cindi Strauss, who, along with Damian Skinner, are the co-authors of In Flux: American Jewelry and the Counterculture. Susan is the founder of Art Jewelry Forum and for several decades drove the organization. Cindi Strauss is the Curator of Decorative Arts, Crafts and Design at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Susan and Cindi, welcome to the program. Susan: Thank you. Cindi: Thank you for having us, Sharon. Sharon: So glad to have you. Can you each give us a brief outline of your jewelry journey? Susan, do you want to start? Susan: Sure. My journey started in the 80s. I had a gallery in Mill Valley, California. I was showing various crafts, ceramics mostly, and a bit of glass, fiber, a whole grouping, and then I decided I should show jewelry. I don't really know why, because I didn't wear jewelry, but it sounded like a good idea. I started showing it, and I was very impressed with how smart and incredibly skilled the artists were. I continued to show that, and the gallery became known for showing jewelry. In 1997, I still had the gallery, and I decided along with numerous other craft groups that we should start an organization that represented the collectors of jewelry. I started Art Jewelry Forum with the help of several other people, of course. That has continued onto today, surprisingly enough, and it now includes not only collectors, curators and gallerists, but also artists and everybody who's interested in contemporary art jewelry. Sharon: It's an international organization. Susan: Yes, it's an international organization. It has a website with a lot of articles. We plan all kinds of things like trips to encourage people to get to know more about the field. I also was part of a funding organization, shall we say, a small private fund called Rotasa, and years ago we funded exhibitions and catalogues. That switched into funding specific things that I was working on instead of accepting things from other people. I've been very interested in publishing and doing research about this field because I feel that will give it more value and legitimacy. It needs to be researched. So, that's one of the reasons why this book came into being as well as Flocks' book. It really talks about the beginnings of American contemporary jewelry in the 60s and 70s. That's my beginning to current interest in jewelry. Sharon: I just wanted to say that people can find a lot more if they visit the Art Jewelry Forum website. We'll have links to everything we talk about on the show. Cindi? Cindi: Sure. My jewelry journey was surprising and happened all at once. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, had no contemporary jewelry in its collection until 2000, when we acquired an Art Smith necklace from 1948. That was my first real knowledge of post-Arts and Crafts jewelry and post-Mid-Century, people like Harry Bertoia. That led me to Toni Greenbaum's Messengers of Modernism catalogue, a fantastic resource for American jewelry from the 30s through the 50s. It opened a whole new field for me, and I started to think about how we should focus on some modern jewelry from that period to expand on the Art Smith necklace, because that Mid-Century design was a specialty of the institution.  Truly, I would say my life changed in respect to jewelry for the better in every way I could explain. When the museum acquired, in 2002, Helen Williams Drutt's private collection of artist-made contemporary jewelry, dating from 1963 to 2002 at the time of the acquisition, in one fell swoop, we acquired 804 pieces of international jewelry as well as sketchbooks and drawings and research materials. We began to build an extensive library. Helen opened her archives and we had recordings of artist interviews. It was just going from zero to sixty in three seconds and it was extraordinary. It was a field I knew really nothing about, so I was on a very steep learning curve. So many people in the field, from the artists to other curators to collectors—this is how I met Susan—were so generous to me in terms of being resources. The story about how the acquisition happened is familiar to probably many of your audience, so I'll keep it brief, which is to say that there was an exhibition of Gijs Bakker's jewelry that Helen organized for the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. Sharon: Cindi, I'm going to interrupt you for a minute because a lot of people listening will not have heard of Gijs Bakker. Cindi: Sure. Gijs Bakker, one of the most prominent Dutch artists, began his career in the 1960s, along with wife, Emmy van Leersum, and was part of the group of Dutch jewelry artists who revolutionized the concept of contemporary jewelry using alter-native materials. They created a lot of photo-based work challenging the value system of jewelry and also challenging wearability. It was his photo-based work that was shown in a small exhibition at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in March 2002 as part of a citywide festival called Photofest, which is all photography-based work. It was through that exhibition, at the opening weekend—that's how I met Helen. I said to her, “This is something I don't know anything about. I'm interested in exploring it. I'm starting to build a collection for the museum. Could we meet and have coffee and talk?” So we met, and I peppered her with a lot of questions and said, “Could I call on you for advice in terms of building a collection?” Of course, at this time she had the gallery, and she said, “Well, you know, I have a collection,” and I said, “Yes, I know, and I understand it's going to the Philadelphia Museum of Art,” her hometown museum. She said, “Not necessarily. We haven't had any formal talks about that.” So, one thing led to another, and six months later, we signed papers to acquire the collection. That set me off on my initial five-year journey, which resulted in the exhibition and catalogue “Ornament as Art: Contemporary Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection” that opened in Houston and traveled to Washington, D.C., to Charlotte, North Carolina, and to Tacoma, Washington. After that point, I felt that I was really steeped in the field. I have, since that point, been adding works to the collection. It was always going to be a long-term commitment and journey for the museum. We have works installed all over the museum in relationship to other contemporary art, whether it's photography, prints and drawings, sculpture, painting. We also have a robust presentation of jewelry in our departments' galleries. It is an ongoing journey, just like with Susan. It's a journey that never ends, happily. There are always new artists to discover and new ideas. Part of that is our meeting of the mind, if you will, and then with Damian, is what resulted in this book. Sharon: How did you come to write the book? Susan, you started to mention it. The research in this is jaw-dropping. How did you decide to write the book? Why this particular period, the two of you? Susan: We decided to write the book because I was wondering what's American about American jewelry. Europeans have done a lot of research and writing about their beginnings, but I didn't see a document or a book that really talked about the American origins. As Cindi mentioned, Gijs Bakker started in the 60s. So did American contemporary jewelry, but it's a very different story than the European one. We wanted to talk to the people who are still alive now, so we did tons of interviews for the book. We specifically concentrated on the pioneers who were responding to the political and social events of the time. In other words, we were investigating those artists who were considered narrative artists, because that was the defining feature of American art to those out of the country. We wanted to discover who was making this work and what were they saying in their narrative, so really answering “What was American about American jewelry?” We did tons of research through old documents of the American Crafts Library. We went all over the country and interviewed, and it was about a five-year-long process to get this point. The book is incredibly condensed. You can feel that there's a lot there, but it took a lot to condense it down to that.  Really, what we hope is that it's an easy-to-read story about the stories that jewelers were telling at the time, which was the origin of all that's come down to us now. It was the beginning of the development of university programs in the country. They just were in the process of expanding them, and people were learning how to make things. Nobody had a lot of skills in this country, so everybody had to learn how to make things. There were a lot of alternative ways of passing around information. The counterculture, we regarded that not as hippies per se, although hippies were part of it, but also a lot about the political and social issues of the time and how people responded to them. The ethos of the time, the values that people developed really became part of the craft counterculture itself. The craft field is based on a lot of those ways of working in the world, a sort of hope and trying to create a new society that had more values than the 50s had aspired to for each individual. People were trying to find ways to have valuable lives, and doing something like making something yourself and selling it at a craft fair became a wonderful alternative for many people who had the skill to do that. That was a very different way of having a life, shall we say, and that's how American jewelry developed: with those values and skills. I still see remnants of it in the current field. That's my focus. Cindi, do you have some things you want to add to that? Cindi: Yeah, the larger public's ideas and thoughts about American jewelry from that period were rooted in a history and an aesthetic that emerged largely on the East Coast, but certainly spread, as Susan said, with the development of university programs. That was an aesthetic that was largely rooted in the organic modernism of Scandinavian influence, as well as what had come before in America in terms of modernist studio jewelry. There's a history there in the narrative, and that narrative played out in early exhibitions. It played out in the first SNAG exhibition in 1970 in St. Paul, which is considered one of those milestones of the early American studio jewelry movement.  Now, we knew that there were artists like Fred Woell, Don Tompkins, Ken Cory, Merrily Tompkins, who were on the West Coast and working in a different vein, as Susan said, a narrative vein, and who were often working with assemblage techniques and found materials and were making commentary on issues of the day. Within the accepted history of that period, they were a minority, with the exception of Fred Woell and really Ken Cory. Their work was not as widely known, as widely collected, as widely understood. Damian and Susan and I started after we thought, as Susan said, “What is American about American jewelry?”  Fred Woell was an artist who immediately came to mind as embodying a certain type of Americanness. We had an extraordinary trip to visit with Fred's widow, Pat Wheeler, and to the see the studio and go through some of his papers. When we went, we thought we would be doing a monograph on Fred Woell. It was on that trip that we understood that it was a much larger project, and it was one that would encompass many more artists. As part of our research, there were certain artists who were known to us, and our hope was that we would rediscover artists who were working intently during that period who had been lost to history for whatever reason. There were also artists whose work we were able to reframe for the reasons that Susan mentioned: because of their lifestyle, their belief system, the way they addressed or responded to major issues during the day. So, we started developing these list of artists. I think what readers will find in the book is looking at some of the well-known artists, perhaps more in depth and in a new frame of analysis, but also learning about a plethora of other artists. For us, it was five years of intense work. There's a tremendous amount of research that has gone into this book, and from what we've been hearing, it has enlightened people about a period. It's not an alternative history, but it is an additional history. We hope it will inspire people to pick up the mantle and go forth because, of course, one has constraints in terms of word counts for publishing. At a certain point, you have to get down to the business of writing and stop the research, but there are so many threads that we hope other scholars, curators, students, interested parties will pick up and carry forth. In some ways we were able to go in depth, and in other ways we were able to just scratch the surface of what has been a fascinating topic for all of us. Sharon: I have a lot of questions, but first, I just wanted to mention that SNAG is the Society of North American Goldsmiths, in case people don't know. Can you explain, Susan or Cindi, what narrative jewelry is? Cindi: There's no one definition. Everybody would describe it a little bit differently, but I think a basic definition is jewelry that tells a story, that uses pictorial elements to tell a story. Whatever that story is can range from the personal to the public, to, in our case, responding to things like the Vietnam War, politics, etc. Susan, do you want to add to that? Susan: It's a very difficult thing to do when you think about. Narratives usually have a storyline from this point to that point to the next point. Here's a jeweler trying to put a storyline into one object, one piece. It is tricky to bring enough imagery that's accessible to the viewer together into one piece to allow the viewer to make up the story that this is about or the comment it's trying to make. You have to be very skilled and smart to make really good narrative jewelry. Sharon: It sounds like it would be, yes. When you realized what this book was going to entail—it sounds like you didn't start out thinking this was going to be such a deep dive—were you excited, or were you more like, “I think I'd probably rather run in the other direction and say, ‘Forget it; I can't do it'”? Susan: I don't think at any point did we stop and think, “Oh, this is a gigantic project.” We just thought, “Let's see. This person's interesting; O.K., let's talk to this person. Oh, gosh, they said these about this other person. Let's talk to them.” You just go step by step. I don't think, at any point, did any of us realize how vast a project this was until the end, probably. Cindi: Yeah, I would say because it happened incrementally, deep dive led to another and another. We would have regular meetings not only over Skype, but we would get together in person, the three of us, for these intense days in which we would talk about—we each had different areas we were focusing on. We'd bring our research together and that would lead to questions: “Should we explore this avenue?” Then someone would go and explore this avenue and come back, and we would think, “Maybe that wasn't as interesting as we thought it was going to be,” or maybe it was far more interesting than we thought, so it spun out a number of different avenues of research.  At a certain point, we started looking at the most important threads that were coming out and we were able to organize them as umbrellas, and then look at subthemes and think about the artists. It became like a puzzle. We had pockets of deep research, whether it was the in-person artist interviews or whether it was the archival research that was done, whether it was the general research. Damian and I were not alive during this time. Susan was, which was fantastic because I learned a lot about this in history class and school. Damian is a New Zealander, so he was coming at it from an international perspective. There was a lot of reading he did about American history, but Susan was the one gave us all the first-person accounts in addition to the artists. She participated in the American Craft Council Craft Fairs and was able to balance the sometimes emotionless history books with the first-person experiences that made it come alive. I think that's what you see throughout the book. It was important to us that the book would be readable, but it was also important to us that it would have a flavor of the times. When you do oral history interviews, there are many different kinds of questions that can be asked. We set out to talk not only about the jewelry that artists were making, but their lives, what was important to them, how they felt. The richness of experiences and emotions that came out in those interviews really inflected the book with feeling like you were there and a part of what these artists were thinking. This is a 2 part episode please subscribe so you can get part 2 as soon as its released later this week. 

L'olandese Gijs Bakker è l'ospite di oggi di Artscapes. Alla ricerca dello spirito creativo, del “punto di rottura” dal quale nasce una nuova visione, una nuova prospettiva: un designer, una figura dinamica, uno dei fondatori di Droog Design...Buon ascolto !

A tour of our favourite galleries and artists from the Design Miami 2013 show. Featuring Formlessfinder, Humans since 1982, Jon Stam, Julien Carretero, Guilherme Torres, Simon Heijdens, Nao Tamura, Wonderglass, Tahar Chemirik, Nacho Carbonell, Djim Berger, BSL, BCXSY, Wonmin Park, Nika Zupanc, Rossana Orlandi, Gijs Bakker, Reinier Bosch, Dominic Harris, Stuart Haygarth, Carpenters Workshop, Campana brothers, Studio Job, Maarten Baas, rAndom international.

A tour of our favourite galleries and artists from the Design Miami 2013 show. Featuring Formlessfinder, Humans since 1982, Jon Stam, Julien Carretero, Guilherme Torres, Simon Heijdens, Nao Tamura, Wonderglass, Tahar Chemirik, Nacho Carbonell, Djim Berger, BSL, BCXSY, Wonmin Park, Nika Zupanc, Rossana Orlandi, Gijs Bakker, Reinier Bosch, Dominic Harris, Stuart Haygarth, Carpenters Workshop, Campana brothers, Studio Job, Maarten Baas, rAndom international.

A tour of our favourite galleries and artists from the Design Miami 2013 show. Featuring Formlessfinder, Humans since 1982, Jon Stam, Julien Carretero, Guilherme Torres, Simon Heijdens, Nao Tamura, Wonderglass, Tahar Chemirik, Nacho Carbonell, Djim Berger, BSL, BCXSY, Wonmin Park, Nika Zupanc, Rossana Orlandi, Gijs Bakker, Reinier Bosch, Dominic Harris, Stuart Haygarth, Carpenters Workshop, Campana brothers, Studio Job, Maarten Baas, rAndom international.

Tim Vermeulen interviews pioneering designer, educator and entrepreneur Gijs Bakker, the co-founder of Droog Design and founder of the jewellery brand Chi Ha Paura...?, about the importance of raising cultural awareness and the role of design education in industrial culture. Bakker talks about jewellery design and its relationship to his industrial practice, his role in design education in the Netherlands, and his culturally focused entrepreneurship. Vermeulen pays particular attention to Bakker’s ongoing efforts to develop a worldwide cultural design practice. This interview was recorded before a live audience during Tokyo Designers Week 2010. Learn more about Pioneers of Industrial Culture at www.premsela.org.

Yii, started by the Taiwan Craft Research Institute to stimulate a more creative conversation between Taiwanese designers and traditional craftsmen. It's quite interesting to see Asia is picking up on conceptual design and generating their own designers and it will be a good place to keep an eye out for the future design stars. Through the magic of skype, Gijs Bakker was able to closely involved in the process with his role as creative director. They chose to stick to Taiwanese designers instead of bringing in Westerners. The collection revolves around 3 main themes, Inspired by Nature, Cultivation and Sustainability. It's the result of 15 designers working together with 20 master craftsmen and went on show at the salone di mobile at the Triennale of Milan.

Yii, started by the Taiwan Craft Research Institute to stimulate a more creative conversation between Taiwanese designers and traditional craftsmen. It's quite interesting to see Asia is picking up on conceptual design and generating their own designers and it will be a good place to keep an eye out for the future design stars. Through the magic of skype, Gijs Bakker was able to closely involved in the process with his role as creative director. They chose to stick to Taiwanese designers instead of bringing in Westerners. The collection revolves around 3 main themes, Inspired by Nature, Cultivation and Sustainability. It's the result of 15 designers working together with 20 master craftsmen and went on show at the salone di mobile at the Triennale of Milan.

Yii, started by the Taiwan Craft Research Institute to stimulate a more creative conversation between Taiwanese designers and traditional craftsmen. It's quite interesting to see Asia is picking up on conceptual design and generating their own designers and it will be a good place to keep an eye out for the future design stars. Through the magic of skype, Gijs Bakker was able to closely involved in the process with his role as creative director. They chose to stick to Taiwanese designers instead of bringing in Westerners. The collection revolves around 3 main themes, Inspired by Nature, Cultivation and Sustainability. It's the result of 15 designers working together with 20 master craftsmen and went on show at the salone di mobile at the Triennale of Milan.