 Good evening everyone. Good evening. I'm Ruki Ravekumar, director of education, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the Cooper Hewitt. It's been an exciting time here. The Access Placibility Show has served as quite a stimulus. We've had many robust conversations on the importance of access and inclusion. And on April 13th, we will open SENSES. It's an amazing exhibition that serves as an invitation for visitors to encounter design with all their senses. Featuring inclusive interactive installations created in collaboration with contemporary designers and products that enhance life for all, including those with sensory disabilities. The senses will be a vivid, intimate experience of sensory design, so don't miss it. We're happy that we've been able to activate the galleries here tonight. We don't do this often, so it's a treat. I hope you've had a chance to walk through jewelry of ideas. This exhibition features extraordinary gifts from the Susan Grant Lewin Collection. Thank you Susan. She's here tonight. If you would give her a round of applause, please. The collection and the exhibition eliminates the radical conceptual and material developments in jewelry design that had transformed the field. The works on view show how jewelry has moved far beyond its aesthetic considerations to stake out new creative territories through a mastery of materials, innovative techniques, and conceptual inquiry. But tonight, it's my pleasure to welcome and introduce art historian Tony Greenbaum. She will discuss cogent issues affecting the evolution of studio jewelry in the United States during the mid 20th century. Tony Greenbaum is a New York based art historian specializing in 20th and 21st century jewelry and metal work. She wrote Messengers of Modernism, American Studio Jewelry 1940 to 1960 along with numerous book chapters, exhibition catalogs, and essays for art publications. She's currently writing a monograph on Modernist Jewelry, Sam Kramer. She has lectured internationally and she has also curated exhibition for several museums including the Victoria and Albert in London. Tony is an associate professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York where she teaches a course in Theory and Criticism of Contemporary Jewelry. Please welcome Tony Greenbaum. Well, Rookie, thank you so much. I feel like a Madonna. I'm not Madonna. Oh, Madonna. Here in this beautiful halo. Thank you so much to the Cooper Hewitt Museum for having me. And mostly, thank you so much to Susan Grant-Lewin for donating her fabulous collection and making me able to give this talk to you tonight. So, tell me if you can't hear me. I probably don't even need the mic. However, during the next hour, I'm going to address some of the most influential makers who worked within the discipline. The discipline of mid-20th century American Studio Jewelry. Those who set the stage for a revolution in our cultural vernacular and laid the foundation for a trajectory that continues its ascent to the present. I'll place these jewelers within a broad cultural context regarding seminal exhibitions along with social, educational, organizational, commercial, and professional opportunities afforded them during the mid-20th century. In other words, this is going to be like you're back in school. Okay, although for reasons particular to each country or region, a modern jewelry aesthetic was developing simultaneously elsewhere in the world, the primary impetus for such a jewelry expression in the U.S. was to provide relatively inexpensive, handmade pieces for a sociopolitically progressive and artistically astute subculture as part of a general craft revival that rejected the anonymity, standardization, and industrialization of the post-World War II era. The influences sprang from the fine arts, painting and sculpture, rather than from other forms of jewelry, either fine or costume, except in certain instances where ethnic or tribal examples proved inspirational. A paradox existed between an early lack of skill-based, jewelry-specific training facilities available in America and the legions wishing to explore a modern jewelry aesthetic. Often the earliest practitioners from the 1930s into the 1940s were primarily painters and or sculptors, and their formal influences were the great movements in modern art, particularly cubism, constructivism, surrealism, biomorphism, data, and later abstract expressionism. With few exceptions, the earliest American makers were essentially self-taught, rarely trained in the techniques of metalsmithing, and had to often turn to de facto educational opportunities, such as observing ships foragers and welders at the dockyards, or learning small-scale casting at the dentist. Boston silversmith, Margaret Craver, took a metalsmithing class at University of Kansas in the late 1920s, where she complained the instructor couldn't even solder. Due to her frustration searching for a well-designed wedding ring around 1929, San Francisco artist, Margaret DePata, studied the rudiments of metalsmithing with an Armenian-born artisan, so that she might make one for herself. There were some notable exceptions. As early as 1904, the Department of Jewelry and Metalsmithing was founded at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, due to the active commercial silver industry, notably the Gorham Company, which was located nearby. In New York, Brooklyn's Pratt Institute offered Art Medal, which was attended by Master Smith Marie Zimmerman around 1900. The local chapter of the American Red Cross sponsored jewelry and metalwork classes at Riverside Church in Morningside Heights. And since 1930, the 92nd Street Y has developed a fine program where many world-class jewelers taught and continue to teach to the present day. Teachers College at Columbia University instituted a metals class that was attended by Seattle Smith Ruth Pennington during the summer of 1929. In 1945, New York Jeweler Ed Wiener took an evening course there in General Crafts, similar to those at the Craft Students League and West Side YMCA. But other than arts and craft sessions, there weren't many accessible hands-on opportunities. There was activity in California as well. Local high schools, for example, one in the San Diego area, offered evening adult education classes in jewelry making, where James Parker, who taught high school photography, art, and English, learned the basic skills. An obscure jewelry class taught by notable ceramicist Glenn Lukens at University of Southern California in Los Angeles was attended by New York Jeweler Sam Kramer in the mid-1930s when he was a journalism major there. Ceramicist and Jeweler F. Carlton Ball, who went on to teach both disciplines at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, also studied with Lukens. Therefore, what compelled American makers to pursue jewelry given these impediments? Each had his or her own personal reason. Some, like broad-based Jeweler Alexander Calder, whose impact upon American studio jewelry cannot be overstated, and Harry Bertoya, with whom he often exhibited, already possessed metal smithing skills used for their sculptures and wished to exercise them to fabricate gifts of jewelry for family and friends. But when demand for these jewels extended to those who collected their monumental works, they began to make pieces that were commercially available through the art galleries that represented them. In Calder's case, Pearls and Marion Goodman Galleries in New York City. Calder and Bertoya often showed together at Alexander Gerard Gallery in Detroit. Others, such as sculptor Ibram Lassaw, viewed his broaches and pendants as maquettes, or studies for larger works. Paul Lobel. Ed Wiener. Susan and I have a private joke. Sam Kramer. Art Smith. Henry Steig. Bill Tendler. Irina Brenner and Jules Brenner. Betty Cook. Peter Macchiarini. Everett McDonald. Philip Pavel. And many others viewed handmade jewelry as a means to generate income and open their own shops to support themselves and their growing post-World War II families. Iconoclasts, all. They possessed adventurous, independent, and pioneering spirits. One of the earliest American craft enterprises founded in 1932 was the League of New Hampshire Arts and Crafts since 1968, the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen. In 1939, philanthropist, ceramicist, and craft aficionado Eileen Osborn Webb began an affiliation of craft groups called the Handcraft Cooperative League of America. They established markets in metropolitan areas for rural craftsmen and women. The following year, America House, a major retail outlet for multimedia hand work including jewelry, opened at 7 East 54th Street near the Museum of Modern Art. Several New York jewelers were also active in the New York Society of Craftsmen. Through numerous mergers, name, and regional changes, the Handcraft Cooperative League of America would become what we know today as the American Craft Council, which currently operates a library in Minneapolis and publishes American Craft Magazine. In 1956, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, now Museum of Arts and Design or MAD, opened as an affiliate, which it is no longer. The museum is currently located at to Columbus Circle. MAD houses a stellar collection of studio jewelry, a sampling of which is perpetually on view in their dedicated jewelry gallery. In 1966, the first retail craft fair was held under the auspices of the American Craft Council in Stovermont. The fair would ultimately develop into a huge operation, relocating to Rhineback, New York in 1973. And it continues this day to this day at several locations around the country. The Second World War was a pivotal, albeit ironical, force in American metalsmithing education, which began in most instances as physical therapy for soldiers returning from the front as the basic processes of jewelry making were found to strengthen hand and arm muscles and foster eye hand coordination. Victor D'Amigo, director of education at the Museum of Modern Art, began the War Veterans Art Center in 1944. The jewelry class was so popular that civilians wished to join as well. In 1949, it was reconfigured as the People's Art Center. The same year, the museum published How to Make Modern Jewelry by Charles J. Martin, instructor in the jewelry and metalsmithing class. Several other how-to books were published between the late 1940s and 1960s. Some deserving mention are jewelry making for schools, tradesmen, craftsmen by Murray Bowen, metal techniques for craftsmen by Uppy Untracked, modern jewelry design and techniques by Irina Brinner, hand wrought jewelry by Lois E. Frank, Contemporary Jewelry, a craftsman's handbook by Peter Morton, by Philip Morton, and Step-by-Step Jewelry by Thomas Gentilly. School for American Craftsmen, begun by Eileen Osborn Webb and the American Craftsman's Educational Council, was opened at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire in 1944. The first student was a discharged Marine who had been injured in combat. School for American Craftsmen moved to Alfred University in Alfred, New York in 1948, where John Pripp, an American of Danish descent, was hired to run the metalsmithing program. In 1950, it moved to Rochester Institute of Technology, where an important metalsmithing department would flourish. Innovative Southern California jeweler, Svetozar Ortoza, Rudakovich, taught there from 1955 to 1958, RIT additionally sparked a significant commercial project. In 1952, Pripp, along with ceramicist Franz Wildenhayn and cabinet maker Taga Frid, opened Shop One, the sole retail outlet for crafts in the area. They were soon joined by American jeweler Ronald Hayes Pearson, who created some of the most popular and accessible handcrafted jewelry of the period. And that's Ron Pearson and Jack Pripp with students there. Broach by Jack Pripp and his dimension service designed in 1960 for Reed and Barton and Vision Flatware and a necklace by Ronald Hayes Pearson. The Vision Flatware was manufactured by International Silver, so they did more than just design jewelry. Charles Lollema, a Hopi Indian, who developed an avant-garde style which catapulted traditional Native American silver and turquoise jewelry into the modern era, had originally studied ceramics at the School for American Craftsman during its brief tenure at Alfred. And this fantastic bracelet is in the permanent collection at MAD. Another avant-garde educational program to grow out of veteran's therapy was the National Silver Smithing Workshop Conferences organized by Margaret Craver. During the war, she had been sponsored by Handy and Harmon Precious Metal Refiners in New York City in her efforts to develop a program to administer occupational training through metal smithing to hospitalized soldiers. After the war, her frustration with the lack of effective metals education available to those wishing to learn the techniques led Craver to prevail upon Handy and Harmon to support a series of month-long summer workshops that were aimed at art teachers. Held from 1947 to 1951, first at Rhode Island School of Design and then Rochester Institute of Technology, they were taught by prominent European smiths, Baron Eric Fleming from Sweden and William E. Bennett and Reginald Hall from England. Some who would go on to become American Jewelry Masters, as well as influential educators, such as John Paul Miller at the Cleveland Institute of Art and, incidentally, Thomas Gentilly's sophomore design teacher. Alma Eicherman at Indiana University in Bloomington and Earl Parden at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York were participants. There were additional courses of significance in the Los Angeles area, including UCLA in the 1940s. Ernest Ziegfeld offered jewelry making courses from 1956 to 58 at California State College Long Beach. Ray Hine also taught at CSULB and California State University Fullerton. Transplanted New Yorker Alvin Pine, who influenced many California makers when he taught at CSULB from 1962 to 1996, replaced Hine when he went to Fullerton. Northern California Jeweler Bob Winston taught Irina Brenner, who ultimately resettled in New York at California College of Arts and Crafts Oakland, and enamelist Franz Bergman ran a jewelry class at California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. There were pockets of jewelry activity throughout the United States. For example, in remote areas such as Eureka Springs, Arkansas, Elsa Freund was fabricating calderesque silver or enamel cuffs and pendants that incorporated her own combinations of local clay fused with glass that she called el ceramic. Mary Kretzinger was doing enamel work, innovative pictorial gemstone collages, and fused metal in Emporia, Kansas. Chicago glassmakers Michael and Francis Higgins, although specializing in tabletop objects, created necklaces and earrings from spirals of brass and glass shards. In the Northwestern United States, Ruth Pennington was developing the metals department at University of Washington, Seattle, training assemblage jeweler Ramona Solberg, who went on to influence important contemporary makers, Kiff Slemmons and Lori Hall. Betty Cook opened a retail shop in Baltimore, Maryland to market her own minimalist designs along with work by other makers. And Harry Bertoya hand forged organic leaf and insect like pieces that he either gave or sold to members of the Cranbrook community of art in Bloomingfield Hills, where he was teaching graphic arts at the time. Nevertheless, studio jewelry was a mostly bicoastal phenomenon concentrated in New York City on the east coast and San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego in the west. New York City's Greenwich Village was home to numerous vanguard studio shops run by individual jewelers with several spread along West 4th Street. Francisco Robajes was the first to open there. Followed by Paul Lobel in 1944, Robajes opened in 1934. Then Lobel in 1944, and Art Smith, who had been forced to move from his original shop on Cornelia Street in Little Italy in 1948 due to racial tension. Bill Tendler was on West 4th Street from 1955 to 1963, moving to another part of Greenwich Village thereafter. Beginning in 1941 and continuing until his death in 1964, Sam Kramer created a surrealist fantasy in his shop on West 8th Street. Replete with a hand-shaped bronze doorknob that wore a pigskin glove in winter and a window that displayed both a leering red painted eye and sculpted protozoan encircled by flashing light bulbs. In 1946, Edwiner was also downtown, but further east on 2nd Avenue and 2nd Street in what is now the East Village, moving uptown opposite the Museum of Modern Art a year later. Paul Lobel, Edwiner, Jules Brenner and Henry Steig also ran summer versions of their New York City shops in the Art Colony of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Steig achieved incidental fame when his main store located on Lexington Avenue at 51st Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side became the backdrop for Marilyn Monroe's famous scene in which her skirt is blown up through the grading by passing subway train in the 1955 film The Seven-Year Itch. And just as an aside to this, if you watch the film, which I have done on numerous occasions, looking for Henry Steig workshop by Henry Steig, you're not going to find it because this was from the promotional material. The actual scene in The Seven-Year Itch was shot on a Hollywood's downstage. I only care about Henry Steig's shop. Both northern and southern California hosted significant jewelry communities after the war, although the movement was most systematized around the San Francisco Bay Area and the northern part of the state. The overriding reason was the presence of Margaret Tapata, who had studied with Emma Gray, Hungarian constructivist, Laszlo Maholi-Nagy at the School of Design in Chicago, also referred to at the New Bauhaus as the New Bauhaus from 1940 to 1941. Her theoretical approach to jewelry as vision in motion, Maholi's principal tenet, rendered her somewhat of a guru to the other metal smiths working in San Francisco. Most jewelers in northern California sold through craft fairs, not eponymous shops as in New York City, although nannies and artisans shop in San Francisco featured handmade jewelry. The metal arts guild, or MAG, and now answering all of you who said, I know what snag is, but what's MAG? Now you know what MAG is. The metal arts guild was founded in 1951 by Tapata, Peter Macchiarini, Mary Rank, Irina Brenner, and Bob Winston, among others as an educational and promotional catalyst for the San Francisco metals community. The Los Angeles area in southern California boasted suburb jewelers as well, such as Esther Luides, Philip Pavel, both of whom ran shops, Everett McDonald, who had a store in Laguna Beach. And after leaving Venice, Italy, where she created the gates for American art collector Peggy Guggenheim's Palazzo, Claire Fulkenstein worked in Venice, California. There was also energetic activity in the San Diego area, where multimedia crafts people, enamelists among the most prominent, organized allied craftsmen of San Diego, which sponsored various teas and fairs where objects in jewelry were exhibited and sold. Of particular note is James Parker, who made large, strong pieces of jewelry, particularly rings. American studio jewelry was regarded as an important aspect of post-war decorative art, proven by the exhibitions organized to bring it to the public's attention. Although some industrial arts exhibitions prior to the war contained studio jewelry, such as Contemporary Industrial and Handwrought Silver, held at the Brooklyn Museum in 1937, which included pieces by Frank Rebajes and Paul O'Bell, the first museum to mount a show exclusively dedicated to studio jewelry was the Museum of Modern Art in 1946 with modern handmade jewelry, also known as modern jewelry design. It was a circulating exhibition that traveled to 15 additional venues around the United States, thereby introducing thousands of people to studio jewelry. Among those represented, but before I tell you who is represented, which you obviously can't see from that picture. After researching this exhibition, MoMA has really only these very small archival photos, so I had to take a picture of the installation with my phone, so that's what you see there. So you really can't see anything other than the fact that what the display looked like was covered with plexiglass, and the gallery where it was held was in the auditorium gallery. So those of you familiar with MoMA, you go down to the basement to see the movies, the screenings, well that area, that waiting area, that was where they had the jewelry exhibition. So that was the auditorium gallery, and that's what the exhibition looked like. But it was a circulating exhibition, and the people who were included were Annie Albers and Alex Reid, another fantastic image of their case. Harry Bratoya, well we don't know why we have Xanley Lex in there, we'll move on to him later. Annie Albers and Alex Reid, Harry Bratoya, Alexander Calder, Paul Lobell, and Margaret Tapata. It was soon followed by modern jewelry under $50 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1948. So they sort of rift on the display that MoMA did, but made it a lot more interesting, but the name of the show was indeed modern jewelry under $50. Now that show included Bratoya, Tapata, and Lobell, with the addition of Claire Falkenstein, Sam Cramer, Philip Morton, Art Smith, and Bob Winston. This was followed by two exhibitions in print, published by the Walker in 1955 and 1959, expanding the parameters to include Irina Brenner, Betty Cook, Philip Fike, Mary Kretsinger, Earl Parden, John Paul Miller, Ronald Hayes-Pierson, Ruth, and Svetozar Radakowicz. And I have an issue here. There's something on my screen that's not on your screen, which is very strange. So I'll read while Seamus comes running over to help the Madonna. We're not even going to tell you what it is. Okay, hopefully we're good now. It might come up. I'll just yell for you. Okay, designer craftsman USA, organized by the Brooklyn Museum in 1953, contained jewelry. The Memorial Art Gallery at University of Rochester held several exhibitions sponsored by the Hickok Furniture Company that featured jewelry. Cranbrook Art Museum included jewelry in their 1951 alumni show. In 1954-56, the American Federation of Arts organized a traveling exhibition, Three Craftsmen, one of whom was Sam Cramer. Shining Birds and Silver Beasts was a solo exhibition of figurative silver table top sculptures by Paul O'Bell at the American Museum of Natural History in 1949. And in 1951, the museum highlighted his jewelry in From the Neck Up. The Pasadena Art Museum, now Norton Simon Museum, held the 13-part California Design Series from 1954-76 that displayed copious amounts of jewelry made in California. American makers Alexander Calder, Margaret DePata, Irina Brenner, Margaret Craver, Claire Falkenstein, Mary Kretsinger, Philip Morton, and Stanley Lexen. There we go. Now he's at his right place. We're represented in the International Exhibition of Modern Jewelry 1890-1961 at Goldsmiths Hall in London. Okay, the term modernist jewelry was adopted in the 1990s. Around the time my book, Messengers of Modernism, was published to define this category of jewelry and distinguish it from other modern and contemporary expressions. In studying the outstanding collection of modernist jewelry housed in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Quebec, the fulcrum of this book, it became apparent that a common aesthetic thread ran through all. That is, the ornamental interpretation of modern art using the body as a point of reference. Concepts and motifs from Alexander Calder's mobiles, stables, and wire sculptures can be seen in much modernist jewelry, including his own. Art Smith appropriated the kinetics and asymmetry of Calder's mobiles. And they were both influenced by tribal, particularly African regalia and objects. So on the left is an African woman wearing bracelets, which clearly informed Calder's on the right. And on the left is an African embera, or a thumb piano, and Art Smith's modern cuff on the right. Although Ed Wiener's jewelry was originally informed by Cubism, he tells a charming story of how a pair of mobile-like earrings walked into his shop, making no mention of the woman to whom they were attached. Consequently, he broke out of his Picasso-esque rigidity and opted for Calder-esque airiness and movement. Bertoya, Rabahase, Styg, Brenner, McDonald, Freund, Higgins, to name just a few, were also indebted to Calder. Sam Kramer presented himself in a bizarre fashion. And this is Sam with a space girl. He advertised in the New York newspapers for space girls. And these girls would toodle around New York, handing out flyers to advertise his shop. In addition to creating works that reflect nightmarish figures akin to those found in paintings by surrealists Juan Miro, Rene Magritte, and Salvador Dali. And you see the Miro painting on the left and the Kramer skeletal cuff on the right. He was a master at promotion, advertising fantastic jewelry for people who are slightly mad. And would sometimes be dressed in pajamas, sleep on a cot, when prospective customers visited his shop. And in interviewing a gentleman for the book that I'm writing about Sam Kramer, his mother was a collector and he was very young at the time that he would accompany her, actually five or six years old, to Sam Kramer's shop. And he told me that he remembered one time when he was about six and he went with his mother to Sam Kramer's shop to buy some jewelry. And Sam Kramer walked in wearing one shoe and carrying a cocktail. So if you can trust the memory of this older gentleman now from when he was six years old, then this is not apocryphal. These stories are all true. So, I mean, the influences are palpable. Both Smith and Rubahe's display a distinct Jean-Arp-like biomorphism, as well as a strong relationship to Calder. German emigre Annie Albers along with her student Alex Reed at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina conceived Dolly-inspired pendant brooches utilizing objets trouvets such as sink drains and paper clips. Margaret de Pada magnificently translated the principles of constructivism into a jewelry format, specifically that of Maholi Naj, as we've said before. And she would have these stones faceted from behind so that optical illusions were created. In fact, the piece of white gold that is behind the stone is straight. It's because of these multi-facets that our angle of perception is distorted. When we look at the piece, depending on the angle to which we look at it, it looks different. And another Maholi Naj painting with a Margaret de Pada pendant. As he told her, have your stones float in the air. Abstract expressionism, particularly the dripped and pooled textures of American painter Alexander Pollock, can be seen in the layered blobs of silver used by Kramer. As post-war prosperity took hold, a Bonafide craft movement in America began to grow, mostly due to the backlash against banal consumerism. Many folks desired artful handmade objects that were personal, as well as culturally significant. Jewelry no longer directly referenced painting and sculpture, but began to look to itself to define a new and timelier vision. Important metalsmithing programs, which would train some of the American jewelers working today, were founded, such as Philadelphia College of Art, now University of the Arts, where Olaf Skugforz taught, and Tyler School of Art with Stanley Lexen, both in Philadelphia. Alma Eicherman's program at Indiana University, Wayne State University in Detroit with Philip Fike, University of Washington, headed by Ramona Solberg, John Paul Miller at Cleveland Institute of Art, and Arlene Fish at San Diego State University. Fine programs were also located at University of Wisconsin, Madison, Arizona State, University of Arizona, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, and State University of New York, New Paul's, along with several others, either absorbed into programs, or no longer in operation. Stylistically, studio jewelry made during the 1960s was as varied as the individuals who created it. The technical boundaries of metal as a substance were pushed to the limits in works, for example, by Olaf Skugforz, Philip Fike, and Alma Eicherman. Some, such as Stanley Lexen and Carolyn Kriegman, incorporated synthetics or plastics. Ancient metal smithing and enameling techniques were reverentially explored by masters John Paul Miller and Margaret Craver, as well as a renewed respect for nature and the environment seen in works by Miller and Ruth Rudakovich. Vernacular American folk themes and objects were appropriated and combined with metal and other materials in bracelets by Svetozar Rudakovich and necklaces by Ruth Pennington and Chinese Hawaiian Ron Ho. Pop culture was exploited in sardonic assemblages by J. Fred Wall, and I don't think these two pieces need any explanation, particularly come alive, you're in the Pepsi generation. And when you realize that the Pepsi bottle caps are dangling from spent bullet casings, and that the euphoric girl, that those of us were around for this ad campaign in the 60s, surely recognize that her smiling face is housed within a military helmet. We look at it quite differently, as well as the good guys based on a Byzantine icon, the good guys, of course, being Little Orphan Annie, Superman, and Dick Tracy, Robert Ebbendorf, Ken Corey, and the piece on your right, which is a belt buckle called Autumn Sunset, just a word of note about that. It really is a comment about the commercialization of Native American jewelry. This piece, I believe, is from, I think it's around 1970. If those of you who are familiar with Hopi metal work, it's typical metal overlay, Hopi metal silver overlay. But the portion in the middle, which looks, of course, like candy corn, is actually laminated plastic. So there are so many layers of meaning to this piece, commenting again on this late 1960s, early 1970s commercialization of our precious Native American heritage. Donald Tompkins, and the body became more than just an armature at this point in time also, but actually functioned as an element of huge all-encompassing works by Art Smith, Claire Falkenstein, Arlene Fish, and Albert Paley, who was a former student of Stanley Lexans at Tyler School of Art who went on to create architectural commissions, including the gates at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. In 1965, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts presented an exhibition titled The Art of Personal Adornment. Curated by director Paul J. Smith, it brilliantly combined over 350 examples of jewelry from all ages and cultures. Ancient medieval Renaissance, 17th through early 20th century European of all types, with pre-Columbian gold, feathers from the Amazon, Native American and East Indian silver, West African ivory and copper, along with pieces from North Africa, the Nier, Middle and Far East, shell and beadwork from Australia and New Guinea and Central Africa, even tattoos. Organized by areas of the body, chest, waist, arm, hand, foot, neck, and head, the historical and ethnic work was juxtaposed with contemporary studio jewelry by both European and American makers. The latter included Alexander Calder, J. Fred Wohl, Bob Winston Arlene Fish, Claire Falkenstein, Ibram Lassaw, Irana Brenner, Robert Ebbendorf, Ronald Hayes Pearson, Charles Lollima, and Thomas Gentilly. New York Gallery owner Lee Nordness curated a multimedia exhibition of contemporary American crafts titled Objects USA, which opened at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. in 1969, before traveling extensively throughout the United States. The S.C. Johnson Company of Rassine, Wisconsin sponsored the project and the Johnson Collection of contemporary crafts was created, forming the nucleus of the excellent permanent collection at MAD. Jewelers featured include Irana Brenner, Alma Igerman, Phillip Fike, Margaret Craver, Mary Kretzinger, Charles Lollima, Ramona Selberg, Ruth N. Svetozara-Dakovich, Art Smith, Ed Wiener, Mary Wrenk, Bob Winston, John Paul Miller, Olaf Skugfors, all these names are familiar to you now, Stanley Lexen, J. Fred Wohl, Ken Corey, Arlene Fish, and Ronald Hayes Pearson. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, select European jewelers began to spread new ideas to those working in the United States. In 1965, Americans Stanley Lexen and Olaf Skugfors traveled abroad, visiting Friedrich Becker, Reinhold Riling, and Klaus Burry in Germany, Max Freulich in Switzerland, Sigrid Persson in Sweden, and Wendy Ramshaw and David Watkins in England. Japanese American jeweler, Mia Matsukada, is credited with introducing Japan to jewelry from the United States in the American contemporary jewelry exhibition at Odakyu Department Store in Tokyo in 1968, which featured Stanley Lexen and Olaf Skugfors along with herself. Worked by Dutch innovators Heisbacher and Emmie van Leersen toward the United States in artist designer Ben O'Premsel as groundbreaking objects to wear in 1969, Klaus Burry's influence became palpable in, for example, pieces by Robert Ebbendorf after Burry's visit to the United States in 1973. Since 1970, American metal smithing has been galvanized by the Society of North American Goldsmiths, or snag. Snag's mission remains the advancement of jewelry and metal smithing by inspiring creativity, encouraging education, and fostering community. The organization's roots go back to 1968, when Philip Morton held a meeting in Chicago with nine goldsmiths and silversmiths that included Robert Ebbendorf, Philip Fike, Stanley Lexen, Ronald Tays Pearson, and Olaf Skugfors. Out of this initial gathering came two clear goals, to create an organization of designer craftsmen in the metal arts field and to promote a conference of professional jewelers. In 1969, a larger group met twice more, establishing the basic parameters of the organization, its name, and plans for the first snag conference, which were held in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1970. American studio jewelry has flourished. Significant metal smithing programs can be found in colleges and institutions throughout the country. Connoisseurs abound, and more and more major museums are organizing jewelry exhibitions and including jewelry in their permanent collections. In fact, authoritative museums are actually purchasing important works, as well as courting substantial gifts from prominent American collectors. Among these are the Museum of Arts and Design, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Newark Museum in New Jersey, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and Dallas Museum of Art in Texas, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Oakland Museum in California, the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin, and the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington State, the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock. The Renwick Gallery and the Luce Foundation Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Although not in the United States, I must also acknowledge the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, one of the first museums to champion American studio jewelry within an international context. In addition to numerous museums in Europe, such as Dinois Sam Lung in Munich and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, contemporary jewelry has indeed become a global phenomenon, illustrated so brilliantly by Susan Grant Lewin's gift to the Cooper Hewitt. Thank you. Does anybody have any questions? Any questions? It's a lot of information to absorb. Any questions? Any comments? No? No questions? I said it would be like being back in school. No, it's all memorized. That's why I read it because I wanted to make sure I got everything in and everything right. A transcript? Well, it's being recorded. And it's being, yeah, it was recorded and it'll be on YouTube, right, Seamus? Yes. Yes. Yeah, it'll be on YouTube. So you can just watch it over and over and over as much as you want. Yeah, Barbara. I think there's a mic. I think you're being handed a mic. Just for the live stream. I think in the 1950s, maybe even 1949, there was some important Danish silver and maybe even jewelry included shows that came through the U.S. and through New York. And I wondered why, I know this is all focused on America, but why you didn't include sort of that influence? Because we'd be here until midnight. The Danish influence on people like Ron Pearson was monumental. Jack Pripp was Danish. He came here from Denmark and Hans Christensen, who ultimately ran the program at RIT, also was Danish. There was a tremendous amount of Danish influence. You know, the biomorphism went through, helped me out here, senior moment. The Great Dane, he did all the biomorphic forms. It'll come to me. Thomas, you know who I mean. Henning Koppel. Henning Koppel. All the biomorphic forms that I refer to with Art Smith. Certainly Henning Koppel, who was sold through George Jensen, who was in New York. People were seeing that. But I wanted to focus on other aspects than just the Danish influence, which was ultimately more commercial. Tour in a Swedish, that's how I do a whole lecture on. If you want, Cooper Hewitt, I'll come back and do a whole lecture on Danish influence on American jewelry with pleasure. I had to edit somewhere. But you're absolutely right. The Danish influence, particularly Henning Koppel's. Particularly that Henning Koppel to Ron Pearson connection was palpable. The Danish jewelry was everywhere. George Jensen was the most prominent place to see it. Mike. To some extent as well, the whole sort of proclivity to work in silver. Oh yeah, no question. RIT is the perfect example under Hans Christensen. Yes. One moment please, just wait for the microphone for the recording. Thanks so much. So you talk about modernist jewelry, and you talk about the book about it, and then you talk about styles of modernist jewelry. And then you said that each artist's work came from that artist. So how would you, what would be the common denomination for the modernist jewelry? Well, most of the modernist, most of the jewelers who opened shops were influenced in Greenwich Village, as I said, in New York and in California, were influenced by movements in modern art. So I gave several examples. One of the biggest differences between the modernist jewelers, and ultimately what started to happen in the movement as it evolved, is that they left that and they started to think in terms of other ways to express themselves through jewelry. By making the jewelry more, had more political content, more social content, more commentary. It was much more inclusive of the body, you know, examples like that. Whereas the modernist jewelers, those that started working right after World War II, were looking to painting and sculpture for motifs, for ideas, for styles, rather than looking within jewelry itself and how jewelry can be used to communicate in a different way. Do you know, do you understand the, yeah, any other comments, questions? Thomas, yeah. She was actually at the opening of Susan's exhibition. The way her idea is opening, she's incredible. And still beautiful, absolutely, yeah. She's still running, she's 94, I think she said. 94. And still running her shop and designing these very minimalist, clean designs. Okay, so no other comments. Thank you. Thank you very much.