Piece by Piece

© Andrea Baldeck, courtesy MFA Houston

Helen Drutt, photographed by Andrea Baldeck in 1997

© Carl van Vechten, courtesy the Norton Museum of Art

Carl van Vechten's 1950 photograph of Georgia O'Keefe wearing an Alexander Calder brooch

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The past year has been a remarkable one for studio jewelry. Schneier recently gave her 117-piece collection to the Metropolitan in New York, the first such collection to be accessioned by the museum. She felt the gift was a vindication of creators overlooked by the art and design worlds and criticized as being too “crafty.” For the Met, Schneier’s gift was a revelation. “What makes these pieces museumworthy is that they represent another art form,” says associate curator Jane Adlin, who specializes in modern and contemporary design at the Met. “You don’t find them in the jewelry store.”

Also in 2007 the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exhibited 150 highlights from the 600-piece Daphne Farago collection, which it had recently acquired. And last September, the museum appointed Yvonne Markowitz as the first jewelry curator in the U.S.

This fall, contemporary jewelry will get a foothold in New York with a permanent exhibition space in the Museum of Arts & Design’s new home on Columbus Circle. The gallery, the first in the nation, is funded by a $2 million grant from the Tiffany & Co. Foundation. MAD’s collection contains more than 500 important examples of art jewelry from the 1940s to today. In December, just a few months after Markowitz joined the MFA, Ursula Ilse-Neuman was appointed the jewelry curator at MAD. “We’ll be showing cutting-edge jewelry, including ephemeral pieces, the barely wearable and jewelry about jewelry,” says Ilse-Neuman.

“There is a spiking interest by American museums,” says Cindi Strauss, the curator of modern and contemporary decorative arts and design at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Strauss organized “Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection,” the pioneering Philadelphia contemporary jewelry dealer’s assemblage of 800 pieces representing the “greatest hits” from the past four decades of European and American jewelry making. A touring show of highlights is on view through July 6 at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Before the Drutt acquisition (a partial gift and purchase), the MFA Houston owned just one piece of studio jewelry. Now examples by such leading figures as Stanley Lechtzin (a silver-and-resin neckpiece) and Wendy Ramshaw (sculptural pillar rings) have transformed the museum into a contemporary-jewelry destination.

“There seems to be something in the air,” says Strauss. “There has been an incredible shift, not overnight, but a culmination of people working in this field for a very long time.” Many artists, dealers and curators hope the museum shows will help broaden appreciation of the works as well as expand the market for them. Only about 10 to 15 major U.S. galleries are devoted to the category, including Jewelers’ Werk Galerie, in Washington, D.C.; Velvet da Vinci, in San Francisco; Sienna Gallery, in Lenox, Massachusetts; and Ornamentum, in Hudson, New York. Some dealers believe that being associated with the misunderstood craft tradition has marginalized the creators of these pieces and kept down their prices.

“The community is very small, and unfortunately we don’t have the large number of buyers that the fine-art market does,” says Stefan Friedmann, of Ornamentum, who adds that the craft context turns people off, particularly those from the fine-art world. “I’m having a conversation with a gallerist in New York about presenting our work there, but he has expressed fear about going into the craft niche.” Although some galleries exhibiting at design fairs have shown a few pieces of jewelry alongside postwar and contemporary furniture, such events have yet to welcome as exhibitors dealers who specialize in contemporary jewelry. “I’m mystified as to why art jewelry hasn’t become as coveted as chairs and tables,” says Susan Grant Lewin, a jewelry writer and collector whose New York PR firm works for the Design Miami fair.