Jewelry unites the maker and the wearer in what is probably the most intimate of collaborations in contemporary art. The jewelry artist creates a wearable object that is charged with ideas; the object and the ideas bind the wearer to the maker; and the wearer carries the message to a larger audience to complete the artistic vision. In translating their ideas, into physical reality, jewelry makers perform the quintessential artistic balancing art, a feat made all the more challenging when concepts are presented in wearable form.
Materials are the crucial mediators in an object's transformation from the imagined to the actual. The artist's whose necklaces are included in Hanging in Balance capitalize on the structural as well as the aesthetic qualities of all manner of stuff to create their profoundly individualistic statements.
Artists featured: Maru Almeida, Jan Baum, Iris Bodemer, Cynthia Cousens, Bettina Dittlmann, Helen Ellison-Dorion, Sandra Enterline, Nora Fok, Maria Hanson, Dorothy Hogg, Svenja John, Maria Phillips, Anika Smulovitz and Andrea Wippermann.
This publication accompanied the exhibition Hanging in Balance: Forty-two Contemporary Necklaces which was organized by the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso. It features essays by exhibition curators Kate Bonansinga and Rachelle Thiewes and an additional essay on the exhibition by Ursula Ilse Neuman, curator and author of Inspired Jewelry.
This full color book also features dozens of gorgeous photographs of contemporary jewelry by the fourteen artists featured in the exhibition.
Kate Bonansinga is the Director of the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso. From 1991-1999 she taught art history at the Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland, Oregon, where she also served as director and curator of the College s exhibition gallery. There she developed an interest in contemporary art that resides at the intersection of materials-oriented fine craft and concept-driven fine art. She serves on the editorial advisory board for Artl!ies Magazine, Houston, TX and as a national art peer for the Office of the Chief Architect of the United States. During 2005 she was a mid-career fellow at the Smithsonian Institute for the Interpretation and Representation of Latino Cultures in Washington, D.C., and in 2006 she participated in the Getty Center s Museum Leadership Institute. She earned an M.A. in art history, with a focus on the art of Asia, from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Rachelle Thiewes is Professor of Metals at the University of Texas at El Paso and an internationally acclaimed sculptural jeweler. Her works have been featured in numerous publications and are in public collections including the American Craft Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Royal College of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Ursula Ilse Neuman is a renowned curator of contemporary craft and design and is the author of Inspired Jewelry.
