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Cover
Feature: John Iversen
John Iversen
The Artistic Impulse. 2008 Smithsonian Craft Show. Jewelry of
the Classical World The Met’s New Greek & Roman Galleries.
Marian Clayden Fusion of Art and Fashion. Robert
Ebendorf Gems from the Abyss. Colleen Atwood
Dressing Sweeney Todd. Micki Lippe Nature’s Magical
Inspiration. Artist Statement Dolores Barrett. Artist
Statement Sarah Wauzynski. Museum News Shanghai
Museum of Art. Exhibition Review Framing: the Art of
Jewelry / Touching Warms the Art. Exhibition Review
Edge of the Sublime: Enamels by Jamie Bennett. Marketplace
Sierra Pacific Casting.
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John
Iversen |
by
Carl Little |
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The
Artistic Impulse
A dialogue between making art and making jewelry lies at the heart of
the collections that have brought John Iversen national and international
renown. The conversation started when Iversen was a young man learning
the metals trade in Germany. He was artistically inclined yet encouraged
to follow a more stable livelihood. Today, Iversen embraces the back
and forth as he moves forward, building on his vision—and his
impressive success. “I don’t really sit down to make art;
I sit down to make jewelry,” Iversen states. The initial concept
may be obtuse and look like an art object, but the intent, he says,
is “always to make a great brooch, a great bracelet.” Often
starting with an impossibly huge or not so huge object, he will tone
it down. “The artistic impulse always comes first,” he notes,
“and then the piece of jewelry develops out of that.” Photographs
by Robert Hensleigh.
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2008
Smithsonian Craft Show |
by
Pat
Worrell |
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It is an exciting time in the world of craft. Every spring ushers in
another much-anticipated edition of the Smithsonian Craft Show. As cherry
blossoms carpet the nation’s capital and the world outside refreshes
itself, our spirits are renewed by the inspiration of fine craft artists
from across the country showing jewelry, wearables, ceramics, glass,
basketry, wood, and more. But there is more to the excitement about
contemporary craft. As the lines between art, craft and design increasingly
blur, fine craft stands at the crossroads of acceptance into the larger
world of fine art.
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Jewelry
of the Classical World |
by
Robert
K. Liu |
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The Met’s New Greek & Roman Galleries
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, ranks among the premier
institutions of the world, many of its departments essentially museums-within-a-museum.
Such is the case with its Egyptian, Arts of Africa, Oceania and the
Americas galleries, and now, upon the completion of a fifteen-year project,
the new Greek and Roman galleries. In 2000, Ornament covered the opening
of the new second floor galleries for Ancient Near Eastern Art, which
were part of the overall gallery plan (Volume 23, No. 4), along with
the first floor galleries that lead into the centerpiece of the new
exhibits, the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court. With expanded space,
it was possible to remove about fifty-three hundred artifacts from storage
and place them back on display, as well as make the exhibit sequence
logical again, difficult in the past due to closures and changes. In
the ten months since the opening of these new exhibits, there have been
over a million visitors, reflecting the public’s enthusiastic
response. Photographs by Robert K. Liu/Ornament. Courtesy of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Marian
Clayden
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by
Carolyn L.E. Benesh |
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Fusion
of Art and Fashion
For those
with a keen appreciation of rock and roll and its history or for those
of a certain age, think back to another era, its songs and its culture—“I,
I love the colorful clothes she wears; And the way the sunlight plays
upon her hair; I hear the sound of a gentle air; On the wind that
lifts her perfume through the air,” the Beach Boys crooned in
Good Vibrations. That 1966 hit single nicely encapsulates a time—the
burgeoning hippie pandemic—and place—California, which
one poster described as “Where Life Is Better.” This mid-twentieth-century
American culture and geography casts a romantic, nostalgic glow, with
its good and gentle vibrations emanating from those increasingly mythic
distant times, yet still being felt more than forty years later. Photographs
by Lars Seyer, Robert Clayden.
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Robert Ebendorf |
by Glen Brown |
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Gems
from the Abyss
Murmurs from
the past seem to surge and dissipate around the found-object assemblages
of Robert Ebendorf with the measured rising, lingering and fading of
breath: invisible, intangible, irrepressible. The objects of the artist’s
acquisitive habit—toys, tintypes, shards, shells—inhabit
the present yet wistfully recall lost moments in time only faintly and
indirectly grasped through the evidence in aged and weathered surfaces.
Detached forever from their earlier contexts while never ceasing to
implicate them, these found objects play a vital role in a conjurer’s
craft. Before them, memory is persuaded to disburden itself and mingle
its dim contents with other more fanciful products of the mind, twining
together the past and present, the credible and the fantastic in response
to deeply ensconced conflicting needs for explanation and mystery. In
this respect Ebendorf’s works are catalysts for mythology, generating
chains of association that stretch beyond the viewer’s ability
to evade, control or terminate. Photographs by M. True.
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Colleen Atwood |
by
Jill A. DeDominicis |
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Dressing
Sweeney Todd
For over one hundred years cinema has captured audiences hearts' and
attention. Viewers agree to temporarily suspend disbelief in return
for access to imaginary worlds and characters. Screenplay writers, actors,
directors, producers—all of these elements must align for a truly
successful cinematic experience, but sometimes it is the more subtle
details that allow a film to fully communicate the essence of a narrative.
One such detail often overlooked is the costuming. Costume designers
straddle a fine line: Their decisions must not distract from the narrative
itself but serve to quietly complement and elevate it. The particular
color of a shirt, the way a dress hangs just so, a certain stiffness and
cut to a pair of slacks—these
elements help silently set the tone of a film and fully define the characters
within it. Photograph by Peter Mountain.
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Micki
Lippe |
by
Robin Updike |
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Nature’s
Magical Inspiration
Germany, a nation admired for its state of the art engineering and precision
manufacturing, is not the first place you would think of where a visiting
artist might be inspired to loosen up her aesthetic, and, artistically
speaking, let it all hang out. But that is more or less what happened
to jewelry artist Micki Lippe after a nine-month stay in Leipzig, Germany,
a couple of years ago. Sharing a studio in a five hundred year-old building
in Halle, a half hour train commute from Leipzig, Lippe found herself
working at a huge, heavy bench that was mammoth compared to what she was
used to at home in Seattle. She was not sure she would warm up to the
bench. But after an initial period of literally being pushed out of her
comfort zone, Lippe ended up loving the big bench. Her reaction to it
was one of many out-of-the-ordinary experiences that inspired her to reconsider
how she thinks about jewelry and how she makes it. Photographs by
Jennifer Howard Kicinski. |
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