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Mona Szabados and Alex Szabados Immersed in Magic. Sallie Bell A Perfect and Natural Fit. Sharon Portelance Preserving Memory and Desire. Akihiko Izukura Living and Breathing Textiles. Chinese Warring States Glazed Beads Unusual Faience Ornaments of the Zhou Dynasty. Exhibition Review Artwear. Fashion and Antifashion. Costume Arts Chanel. Ancient Arts Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs. Folk Arts 2005 Santa Fe International Folk Art Market. Botanical Jewelry Kikui Nut Jewels of Hawaii. Ethnographic Arts Bukhara Jewelry. Native Arts Totems to Turquoise. Marketplace Beads Galore. Museum News Toledo Museum of Art: Glass Study Collection.

A PERFECT AND NATURAL FIT
Having spent nearly twenty-five years making jewelry, Bell is clearly a designer and artisan who enjoys her work and finds satisfaction in creating arresting jewelry. But it is also impossible to separate her life as an artist from her life as a Buddhist. For her, the two seem a perfect and natural fit. Both require commitment, hard work, and a willingness to undertake challenges. Says Bell: “Jewelry has an incredibly strong spiritual aspect. And when people have the courage to wear it, it makes them feel good because of the spiritual aspect, whether they are aware of it or not.”

Preserving Memory and Desire
A “wiggly path” is how Sharon Portelance describes her career as an artist and metalsmith up to this moment in time. Since graduating from the Portland School of Art in 1982, Portelance has followed a somewhat circuitous route in her artistic endeavors, yet a strong aesthetic vision combined with a love of teaching has led her to a place of critical notice and engaging relevance. “To be able to question yourself takes time,” Portelance points out. She has learned to make art and then step back and evaluate it without suppressing the creative juices. She teaches her own students that they sometimes have to let go of the class critiques and just work. “If you’re constantly evaluating,” she explains, “you’re never going to allow those doors to open that you’re not even sure are going to open because you’re so constantly honest.”

LIVING AND BREATHING TEXTILES
Akihiko Izukura has had a life-long love affair with silk. Silk has inspired his creativity, evolved his philosophy, stimulated his dedication to weaving and dyeing, defined his aesthetics and buoyed twenty-five years of study and research into the history and technology of fiber arts. For thirty years, he has never worn anything else. When he developed skin-allergy problems as a young man, he experimented by making himself some undergarments from what the industry still considers trash, the low-grade silk fibers that are usually thrown away. His allergy disappeared. “Silk is so easy on the skin,” he observes. “It breathes. It cuts ultraviolet light; it absorbs moisture and deodorizes perspiration.”

Unusual Faience Ornaments of the Zhou Dynasty
The Zhou Dynasty (1027-256 B.C.) of China is unique in having produced faience, glass and composite ornaments of glaze with a faience core. Before and after this dynasty, neither faience nor composite beads were ever made again in China. With few exceptions, after the middle to late Warring States period (approximately fourth to third centuries B.C.), elaborate and precise glass beads with stratified eyes and/or rosettes were also no longer a part of ancient Chinese adornment. Interestingly, this is also the same timespan for the making of composite beads. Some glass eyebeads have been found from the Western Han period but these are very different from those of the middle-late Warring States.