Shows and Tales

The challenge of showing contemporary jewelry - under the pressure of creative competition, institutional inertia, and claims of curatorial legitimacy by non-affiliated curators - has given rise to a bubbling exhibition landscape, with amateurs and professionals playing musical chairs to a very D.I.Y. score. Artists mount their own exhibitions. Museums invite amateurs to curate shows from their collection, and visitors to handle work. Collectors issue exhibition lists and detailed...
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The challenge of showing contemporary jewelry - under the pressure of creative competition, institutional inertia, and claims of curatorial legitimacy by non-affiliated curators - has given rise to a bubbling exhibition landscape, with amateurs and professionals playing musical chairs to a very D.I.Y. score. Artists mount their own exhibitions. Museums invite amateurs to curate shows from their collection, and visitors to handle work. Collectors issue exhibition lists and detailed press releases. Meanwhile, the trend towards ever more experimental scenographies continues, with set-ups that never cease to negotiate with our expectations: works are shown on plinths, window sills, chairs, tables, floors; suspended, hung, or nailed; in set-ups in turn immersive, meditative, performative, artefactual, or theatrical. While the question of exhibition making occupies an ever more important place in art theory, there has never been, thus far, a publication on the subject with jewelry as its focal point. Given how extremely busy jewelry curators have been over the last 60 years, it is surprising that the variety of their approaches, and the implied notion that the exhibition space is a space of production, are so rarely acknowledged, nor is the extent to which curation transforms our perception. This publication aims to remedy this absence, and provide an overview of jewelry exhibition history, an understanding of the challenges inherent to showing jewelry in public spaces (whether commercial, institutional or ephemeral), and some insight into what curation can do to jewelry objects. It aims to help professional and amateur curators articulate the relative importance of selection, mediation and experience design, and question their assumptions about display conventions. This publication addresses the question of 'exhibiting jewelry' in three different ways: it features a series of commissioned articles on landmark exhibitions, to plot the evolution of the field, using the exhibition space as a historical marker. It includes commissioned essays by and discussions with curators on the challenges of curating craft. It incorporates, finally, a series of exhibition reviews from Art Jewelry Form's archives that track some recent experimentation with display strategies.