The fine art of jewelry; Glass Pavilion is the setting for a cutting-edge show

‘Dieg Bou Diar,’ a necklace by Mieke Groot. ( THE BLADE/HERRAL LONG ) Zoom Photo Reprints

It’s thinking that’s definitely outside the treasure chest.

Jewelry that is more often about concept than beautifying the wearer; more about precious creativity and technical skill than precious stones and metals that will hold their market value.

GlassWear: Glass in Contemporary Jewelry, through Jan. 31, is the first show to visit the Toledo Museum of Art’s Glass Pavilion since the building opened in August, 2006 with a display of the museum’s own works. In two of the pavilion’s five galleries, the free exhibit features 130 pieces.

“This is a cutting-edge show for a cutting-edge building,” says Jutta-Annette Page, the museum’s curator of glass.

It is an excellent representation of global styles drawn from Cape Town to Melbourne, Brazil to Japan. Notably absent, however, are local glassmakers. Ursula Neuman, the show’s curator, said she’s not aware of any Toledo glass-art jewelers.

“It is a very special thing for glass artists to think in smaller scale and many of them won’t touch it,” she says. Selecting 60 artists from 150 she invited to submit works, Ursula Neuman, curator of jewelry at the Museum of Arts & Design in Manhattan, created the show in conjunction with the Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim in southwestern Germany. (Schmuck is the German word for jewelry.)

Necklace and bracelet combo by Jacqueline I. Lillie. ( THE BLADE/HERRAL LONG ) Zoom Photo Reprints

“I feel jewelry is very innovative as an art form. And glass is as well,” says Neuman, in Toledo for the exhibit’s recent opening.

The popularity of glass in jewelry has ebbed and flowed during the 4,000 years it has adorned people. The current flow began about 50 years ago in Europe and grew as artists discovered new techniques they could do in their own studios.

“Transparency, color, reflections, separation of images, disruption of geometry, imperceptibility, and optical lightness — it is for these qualities and effects that at certain creative moments I choose to use glass and mirrors,” writes renowned goldsmith Giampaolo Babetto, in the exhibit’s accompanying English-German catalog, GlassWear.

Curator Neuman notes that jewelry has often been stigmatized as trinketry, but an exhibit such as this, which will travel to Germany, New York, and other venues after Toledo, can be an image-enhancer.

‘Victory’ by Pierre Cavalan. Zoom Photo Reprints

“It is not easy to get across to visitors that contemporary jewelry need not continually invoke the classic jewelry tradition of gold, silver, and precious stones,” writes Cornelie Holzach, director of the Schmuckmuseum, in the catalog.

Some of these brooches and necklaces could be worn, such as New Englander Linda MacNeil’s 22 polished and faceted squares of clear glass that catch the eye more than the pair of six-inch diameter white-gold circles, encrusted with diamonds, to which they’re attached.

And it would be a stretch, but an Amsterdam artist’s necklace of golf-ball sized clear-glass beads, interwoven with precise cubes made from tomato-paste cans fashioned by a craftsman she met in a Senegal market, could enhance the shoulders on a rare occasion.

So could a necklace of 100 luminous blue and green, chandelier-like glass droplets, created by a Londoner as she held an image of Dora Maar’s tears in mind. Photographer and painter, Maar was Picasso’s beautiful, sad lover and model in the 1930s and 1940s.

Evert Nijland, at 36 one of the youngest artists here, made a particularly elegant 24-inch necklace of tiny, spring-green glass beads folded into barely-pink fluted forms reminiscent of Art Nouveau

‘Difficult to Swallow,’ a wall installation by Timothy Horn. ( THE BLADE/HERRAL LONG ) Zoom Photo Reprints

“By melting and layering individual fragments of glass, I am able to achieve painterly effects evocative of moods, memories, and places,” writes Jaroslav Kodejs, of the Czech Republic. Indeed, his small, square brooch of glass, silver, and gold, possesses Klimt-like color.

But much in these 25 cases was never intended for the body, notably, the 50-foot-long necklace with giant, hollow glass “beads” strung on black, knotted ship rope, and a how-do-you-keep-that-from-breaking tiara made of slender, lab pipettes made of Pyrex. Nor the necklace made of aggressively jagged bottle-necks.

Two artists use use vials as reliquaries, one to contain dried roses, the other sealing items into laboratory ampoules as reminders of important moments -- dried petals from the artist’s wedding, her cat’s ashes, a lock of baby hair, and even oil, Lake Erie water, and borax powder.

Rather than grouping works according to chronology or nationality, Neuman defines five roles that glass can play: as chameleon (impersonating gemstones or flowers, for example); as surface and structure (it’s architectural, and can transform light and color); recycled glass (beach and antique glass, a poison bottle, transfigured industrial glass); glass as symbol and metaphor (transparent, opaque, flashy, unfathomable; both fragile and hard), and glass as glass (its inherent properties are refracting and reflecting light).

Throughout the show’s run, the museum will offer free and low-cost workshops for adult and teen visitors to make glass beads, pendants, and ornaments working at table-mounted torches, a technique called flameworking. Sessions, some with fees, are listed at www.toledomuseumorg.
Source: toledoblade