(Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York, NY. February 13-July 15, 2019)

Contemporary art jewelry is intimately connected to artistic identity, and primarily driven by a concept. A View from the Jeweler’s Bench: Ancient Treasures, Contemporary Statements emphasizes the voices of contemporary jewelers who deliberately appropriate ancient and historical jewelry styles and techniques. The exhibition will highlight the role of the maker in determining the form of the final jewel, and will include a jeweler’s bench, process sketches, and tools alongside jewelry pieces from antiquity to the present. Traditional and current processes employed by jewelers will be displayed alongside contemporary and historical jewels and artifacts. This will illuminate the connections between present and past – in terms of form, technique, and materials – that link modern jewelry and its forerunners while highlighting how contemporary jewelry artists are considering adornment uniquely. The extraordinary objects selected for the exhibition materialize the changing contexts of jewelry through time.

Exhibition Installation Photography

Bard Graduate Center Gallery exhibition page

Exhibition Press:

Antiques Magazine, May, 2019. Read. 

Wall Street Journal, February 28, 2019. Read

WAG Magazine, March, 2019. Read

Forbes, January 12, 2019.  Read 

(Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY. October 15, 2018-February 3, 2019)

It’s easy to fall into the trap of sensational headlines. Even careful and informed readers must work to resist the pull of fake news, a phenomenon currently dominating American media. In his solo exhibition Fake News and True Love: Fourteen Stories by Robert Baines, the Australian contemporary artist explores this issue through the lens of jewelry. By making up and “fact-checking” news stories to accompany his works, Baines manipulates what is accepted as truth to address the influence that fake news has on our perception of events.

Fake News and True Love is a clever examination of jewelry as a document of popular cultural history. The artist’s fanciful pieces and accompanying “evidence” encourage belief in the fourteen stories he presents. Baines has fabricated alternate realities that span from B.C.E. to the present day and encompass an equally wide range of topics, including migration, conspiracy, forgery, celebrity, and politics. His rings, parures, neckpieces, and bracelets show the misunderstandings that design can create, emphasizing the constructed nature of collective history. Through satire and humor, he cautions that linear narration can be confused with myth, riddle, puzzle, and possible subversions of history. Is the story true or fake?

Fake News and True Love: Fourteen Stories by Robert Baines is curated by MAD’s Assistant Curator Barbara Paris Gifford and Windgate Curatorial Intern Sasha Nixon.

Previous iterations were shown at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, as part of the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award exhibition, 2006; Designmuseo, Helsinki, 2008; Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt, 2008–2009; and Handwerkskammer für München und Oberbayern, Munich, 2010

Exhibition Installation Photography

Tabloid PDF 

MAD exhibition page

(Pratt Manhattan, SPCS Gallery, as part of NYC Jewelry Week, New York, NY. November 12-18 2018)

NYC Jewelry Week is NYC’s first and only week dedicated to promoting the world of jewelry through educational and innovative NYC focused programming. In its inaugural year, NYCJW will feature groundbreaking exhibitions, educational lectures, explorative workshops, exclusive tours, and unique collaborations with the best and brightest businesses, brands, individual jewelers, artists, and designers throughout NYC.

ANTIQUEMANIA

Both a timeless visual feast and an intellectual retreat, Antiquemania is a present-day cabinet of curiosities, where it is possible to explore jewelry’s traditional, organic and innovative materials, together with universal ideas of beauty, desire, memory, nature, death... Antiquemania brings together an eclectic group of contemporary jewelers whose different approaches to historical jewelry create an enriching visual dialogue between the past and the present, ancient and contemporary identity, materials, techniques, and aesthetics.

LIST OF JEWELRY DESIGNERS (Artist bios)

Isabelle Busnel - France

Ashley Buchanan - Atlanta, GA

Miranda Leigh - Brooklyn, NYC

Jennifer Trask - Lake Tahoe, NV

Melanie Bilenker - Philadelphia, PA

Kelly Jean Conroy - Boston, MA

Rachel Andrea Davis - Bayview, WI

Alicia Jane Boswell - Lake Worth, FL

Jeanette Caines and Mike Ellis (Jewelry Arts Inc.) - Manhattan, NYC

I was the recipient of the Society of North American Goldsmith's 2017 Emerging Curators Grant. The Emerging Curators program offers grants to assist an emerging curator or curators in executing an exhibition focused on jewelry and/or metalwork. This grant was awarded to me for my proposed exhibition A View from the Jeweler's Bench: Ancient Treasures, Contemporary Statements. Find a description of the grant and my proposal on SNAG website here or an archive of the final exhibition on my Curatorial page.