Piece by Piece

In the mid-1980s, the New York–based collector Donna Schneier visited a London craft gallery and discovered jewelry unlike anything she had ever seen. “I thought it was extraordinary and very inexpensive,” says Schneier, who scooped up Caroline Broadhead’s sleevelike bracelets made from nylon thread and David Watkins’s delicate paper collars. “I’d seen some ‘art to wear’ in the U.S. but nothing like this. I came back with 11 pieces.”

Schneier had stumbled on the world of art jewelry, variously called studio jewelry, wearable art and contemporary jewelry. She began searching for and buying these unusual and sometimes unwearable objects, paying between $500 and $1,000 for what seemed like virtuoso miniature sculptures made out of resin, silver, rubber, gold, leather and every other imaginable material.

Schneier, who is also a private dealer of contemporary glass and ceramics, continued buying for the next 20 years, focusing on dozens of American and European jewelers whom she considered artistically significant. Her collection came to include such 20th-century European innovators as German goldsmith Hermann Jünger and Swiss designer Otto Künzli, who famously encased a gold ball in a rubber bangle. Schneier also bought in depth works by a group of American jewelry artists who emerged in the late 1960s and rose to prominence in the following decades.“I don’t differentiate between artists who make art to wear and artists who make art to hang,” she says.

The history of art jewelry in the U.S. can be traced back to sculptor Alexander Calder. The handcrafted pieces he made for friends and family, beginning in the 1930s, inspired a generation of studio jewelers who worked in metal. Calder’s whimsical, primitive-looking wire brooches and combs are center stage at a retrospective at the Norton Museum of Art, in West Palm Beach, Florida, through June 15; the show opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this December.

From the 1940s to 1960s in New York’s Greenwich Village, a coterie of jewelers, including Sam Kramer and Art Smith, experimented with organic lines and abstract or Surrealist forms inspired by biomorphic art and midcentury design. Twenty of Smith’s pieces were recently given to the Brooklyn Museum, which will show them in “From the Villageto Vogue: The Modernist Jewelry of Art Smith,” opening this month.

The category’s obscurity is partly due to the difficulty of defining it. The pieces are figurative or abstract, wearable or not, and draw inspiration from art, design and the maker’s imagination. These days, curators, dealers and collectors generally agree that to qualify as art, jewelry works must be one of a kind and produced in studios by makers trained in university or apprenticeship programs in art, metalworking or goldsmithing.

Since the ’60s, the American movement has expanded dramatically, forming associations with important graduate schools, such as the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Rhode Island School of Design and the State University of New York at New Paltz. Jewelry artists have tested different mediums, developed storytelling techniques and drawn inspiration from their lives, politics and cultural modes. In the ’60s, several stars emerged, including Robert Ebendorf, who melds poker chips, crab claws and pearls in his experimentation with materials, and Bruce Metcalf, who embeds emotional narratives in his pieces, as in a brooch from 1976 featuring a painted portrait of Metcalf in a straitjacket. Among notable younger practitioners working now are the Portland, Maine–based artist Lauren Fensterstock, who pairs diamonds and rotting potatoes in drawings and sculptures that tug at the boundaries between art, jewelry and ornament, and Jan Yager, of Philadelphia, whose political commentary involves necklaces and brooches constructed from crack vials and auto glass plucked from urban streets.

European art jewelers have also experimented with materials, and while their work is more conceptual, it is also more formal and refined than that of their American counterparts.