Collecting for the Future

Collecting for the Future

"I don't believe any curator who collects in Contemporary Art doesn't think of icons. I couldn't have assembled this collection without thinking, 'When the history of American jewelry is written, I can see these pieces in it."

"I keep coming back to Robert's necklace. It was very, very affordable. The more I look at it, the more elegant it becomes. I'm intrigued by his emphasis on circles through-out, spots of red as color. There are wonderful, unifying themes - not just the rings but within the rings there are buttons, other circular elements, wonderful found objects that look like glass, quartz, pop tops, keys. It has a musical quality. There's nothing precious about it, but there's a light-hearted, lyrical quality that really looks as though it's more appropriate for a spiritual ceremony - I can see it being worn by a priest or priestess - so that you could hear it. Our cultural view of materials gets in the way of our appreciation of art. These are throw aways, to me that's one thing that makes it so wonderful."

Ken Trapp is the Curator of Decorative Arts at The Oakland Museum in Oakland, California. In his ten years with the museum, he has witnessed the arrivals - and departures - of four Museum Directors, and three Chief Curators of Art; "we've had more museum directors in ten years than some institutions have had in over a century." Relentless budget cuts have honed his quick wit and active curatorial stance.

An outspoken advocate for contemporary jewelry, Trapp is actively developing the Museum's collection; most recently he curated "Jewels and Gems: Collecting California Jewelry" - an exhibition of more than one hundred pieces of jewelry made by thirty-nine California artists over the last fifty years - in Oakland through January, 1995. Among the several projects on which he is currently working are "The Weight of Gold: 150 Objects Commemorating the Sesquicentennial of the California Gold Rush"; and "On this Special Occasion: Presentation Metal in California".

MR: What role does jewelry play in the Oakland Museum collection? How has it developed over the years and what inspired you to recently add 54 new pieces to the collection?

KT: I don't think of the jewelry collection as being more significant than the ceramic or furniture collections. Let me be honest: there's no way we could have added 54 pieces of furniture to the collection, or even ceramics. The jewelry ranged from $110 up to several thousand dollars. We got a lot for the money, which was one reason we did it.

I saw an opportunity to develop the jewelry collection and decided the institution had better put its money where its mouth was, that it was time to develop the collection systematically - at least to add artists who weren't even represented. We had no Helen Shirks. Our representation of Arline Fisch was 3 pieces - I mean, she's an internationally known figure, so is Helen, so is Colette… I could go on and name other artists. It was an attempt to retrieve histories.

And - why not jewelry? (Laughs) Why do we find it hard to recognize jewelry as a legitimate art form? Because it's worn or presumed to be worn, it carries with it all this weight - the weight that historically it has presumed status, wealth, and position. One of the questions throughout the history of ornament is, "Does the ornament wear the person or does the person wear the ornament?" We do have to be careful there, but we get so bogged down in trivial matters that we deny ourselves the wondrousness of living. I love to have all sorts of things around me that speak of, quite literally, a textured life, from books to wonderful examples of pottery. All of these things enhance us and add to our visual delight. I was taken with the visual delight - the feasting - that these objects offer.

The Oakland Museum focuses only on the state of California - its Art, History, and Natural Sciences. Here in the art department we focus on visual arts, defining a California artist as someone who has made a body of work with.in the state. The down side in representing a state as we do is that the work is only as good as the work done in the state; I, as a curator can't make work better.

"It doesn't get better than this D.X. Ross piece Stone Age Hollywood. It is a sumptuous use of materials - I love it - a wonderful combination of color and textures. It heads towards refinement but she stops short and brings you back to a Stone Age quality with the use of the rivets, the metals and coil on the ends, giving it some guts."

MR: Given the ongoing financial predicament plaguing so many museums today, it seems miraculous you were able to accomplish this. How were you able to raise enough interest and capital to do it?

KT: I guess it was my track record - the administration trusted me - and we had some money. You'll see that the name "The Estate of Marjorie Eaton" proliferates throughout the exhibition. She was an actress, art collector, artist herself who had given the museum some works of art through her estate with the understanding that they would be sold, and those monies would go back into acquisitions - not to salaries, not to operations - so here, it's feast or famine. Our home is a cardboard box and we're eating caviar. (Laughter). It's really bizarre, but it's also part and parcel of working in non-profits.

My colleagues around the country can't believe what we did. They are just absolutely mind boggled that we were able to acquire so many pieces in seven months.

MR: 54 pieces?

KT: I think it's up to 55 now. It started out slowly - we bought the earrings and scepter clasp and pendant from Kent Raible. I'd been tracking his work for a long time and - well, let me back up even more. One of the reasons we were able to do this is that we were under the gun to get the Margaret De Patta collection out on view. It's a major collection, we should have had it on view - we should be proud of it. I was pounding the doors of the administrators, saying, "You've got to do this, you have a moral obligation." I had to fight and fight and fight. Really. It was mouths flying, telephone calls. That's the only way this was going to happen - you have to make trouble . We are an institution crisis ridden and crisis driven; the squeaky wheel is heard. People don't believe that. People believe if I'm nice, I'll get what I want. Nooo.

MR: Why is this such a unique occurrence; why are no other museums in the county able, or interested, in following suit?

KT: Several of my colleagues say, "My institution wouldn't even collect the stuff." Also, the money we spent - which was a very, very, very reasonable amount - did not have to pass through laborious board decisions.

Now, it's as frustrating on one hand as it is invigorating and liberating on the other hand. My colleagues are not just thinking, "How wonderful and free you are!" They're also thinking, "What a quirky place? Would I want to work in a place like that?" You see, I did something that most of them would be terrified of doing. Try and imagine my Decorative Arts colleagues being given a lump sum of money and told, "No-one will put any restrictions on you - buy what you want." Then you've got to make decisions and the decisions can be wrong; they can also be right. There are a lot of people who hide behind, "We don't have much money, we can't do it." By not having money you don't have to make decisions, and if you don't make decisions there's no risk taking.

I wrote Barbara Gibbs a letter when she accepted the position of Director at the Cincinnati Art Museum, to congratulate her but also to say, 'There are three reasons you might want to consider collecting in Contemporary Craft: it's usually affordable; two, it's overlooked and it presents exciting possibilities; and three, in the future you're going to look back and say, "Why didn't we do this when we had the chance?"' Collecting contemporary is always risk-raking. Institutions don't like to rake risks.

One of the things that recently struck me is that if we started to do surveys of exhibitions in museums over the last 25 years to see what museums have considered important it probably would be extremely revealing - revealing politically, commercially, and culturally.

One of the things we do as Americans, perhaps more than other people, is we tend to categorize and catalogue, to put people and ideas and things into neat little packages. We don't like mess, we don't like the gray area. Here you come along with an area (jewelry) that is not neatly categorized. In Cincinnati, jewelry was subsumed within the Costumes and Textiles division. I think in L.A. it's the same. For some people, jewelry is an accessory to Costume.

Here we're saying we don't have a Costume collection, jewelry is considered a Craft, an Artistic Craft, a Fine Craft - whatever you want to call it - but it's considered worthy of purpose, worthy of study, of value - enough so that we would expend money to maintain and develop it. People aren't used to seeing jewelry in a museum context. Unlike a costume/textile exhibition where you see a mannequin - and what you're really looking at is an Empire gown in which the mannequin happens to be wearing some drop earrings or a necklace - all of these pieces, [here] artificially shown as they are, tell you right away, "I'm a piece of jewelry." There's no mistaking this exhibition for anything other than what it is.

"When I unwrapped Helen's bracelet, that was a thrilling moment. This is the gutsiest piece - it has a wonderful, solid, massive quality. Its mechanicals work gorgeously. It's a delight to touch; it's very erotic, ripe, voluptuous - those curved forms! - yet all these words don't seem to be in harmony with the others. How can we be mechanical and gutsy and ripe - she has it all together."

Another reason jewelry may have a problem is that, when I look at craft, I'm struck by macho posturing that comes out of clay in the fifties and sixties - the Peter Voulkos, Jerry Rothman, John Mason type - "I'm a he-man". Glass, the same thing, "I can blow an eight hundred pound bubble," and somehow it's like, "I'm Godzilla of the northwest." But you come forth with Ebendorf's tinkly necklace made of found rings and dice and so forth, it's like, "What kind of a man are you?" One's masculinity is drawn into question.

One of the curators here said our exhibition schedule was held hostage by testosterone, and I believe it. Think about our exhibitions over the last five years…we've had a shark show, we have a baseball show now, there are hot rods coming up, urban violence….I now refer to our schedule as "The Gonad Series" and "The Wuss Series". Here we are in our department and I'm coming up with all these wuss exhibitions - jewelry, china painting….That's the truth though - the comments that we get, the way people view it. My job is to take that stereotype and show you it's a stereotype. My job as a curator is not to make an artist's reputation, to validate. I'm not trying to validate jewelry - I think it's validated already. What I'm trying to do is bring it to public exposure, to let people know, "Yes, we consider it a work of art." I don't care if you don't consider it a work of art. I don't care. (Laughter.)

It was a rare, rare occurrence for the Oakland Museum to actually have some money that it could put forth and I have to say that I'm very proud of this institution, that we didn't just whine and beg, we stepped forward, we said, "Yes!" There were no deals cut, the transactions were clean and we paid the asking price.

MR: What are the primary impediments deterring other museums from building significant jewelry collections?

KT: One is that they probably don't have it to begin with. Institutions are looking, now, not to add collecting possibilities but to reduce collecting possibilities. Two is that - you know, this amazes me - we're nearing the end of the twentieth century and we're still beating the same old dead horses: we're still talking about validating a work of art, about seriousness of purpose, about materiality over conception.

Last fall I was in Hawaii giving a lecture; I threw it out because it constantly kept running into this art versus craft debate, and me saying this bores me is no help, either. We need an outside arbitrator to help us because the art camp and the craft camp are so entrenched in their views that they'll never meet and talk. It is like a nasty marriage breaking up.

How did we reach such a cultural impasse? I think we aren't asking the right questions. When did these divisions start historically? We're not just talking about craft that's not painting - painting itself is based on rigid hierarchies within our culture, landscape being pretty low but still life being the lowest, portraiture, historical painting going by the way side. We're carrying around a lot of historical baggage.

Look at it through language - how loaded and coded our language is. How do we assign value to a work of art? What are the reasons jewelry is not accorded more cultural value than it is? I had a number of people who were misguidedly thinking contemporary jewelry must be incredibly expensive - they were thinking Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels. Cultural value is also monetary value. Historical, cultural, monetary value… rather than dismissing this, why not look at it? When did this whole debate start? What was the Arts and Crafts movement about? There are questions I'd like to ask, but our answers are going to be rooted in philosophy and language, in other disciplines that can help us see ourselves, and quite frankly. I'm not interested in reaching resolution because it's not resolvable. That's why I say it's like a marriage that's broken down - irreconcilable differences, irretrievable hurts.

MR: Would you comment on the observation that there is a lot of jewelry being made, but little of it is of interest conceptually, aesthetically or technically?

KT: I was really quite disappointed in a lot of the slides and pieces that came to us - I sent a number of them back. There were times I was thinking, "Your technique couldn't match your conception." Another phenomenon I've noticed recently is artists who grow timid. You can see they start out with what seems to be a wonderful conception. Then suddenly, what should have been a monumental sculpture becomes this tiny little thing. If you're going to make clunky jewelry make clunky jewelry - don't go half way. If you commit yourself to a course, complete it. Be bold. Be assertive.

Other work struck me as, "So what?" - and this, for me, is the kiss of death for a work of art. Others looked like things that came from some overpriced, kitschy tourist trap in Carmel.

I've often thought, "How can I help?" and I'll tell you, I'm hesitant because a lot of people cant take criticism. Robert Hughes discusses this in Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America - that the awful legacy of the sixties is emotion. We don't have discourse anymore, we have gut spilling: "I am the artist, dealing with my emotions, and how dare you even try to judge my emotions?" while I'm thinking, "I'm not trying to judge your emotions; can't we get back to standards?" There are standards by which the world's great poetry has been deemed great Poetry. It's been filtered through centuries of expertise. The same with the visual arts - if you are anything more than a hack, let's see some background, some thought, some sensitivity, some questioning.

Another one of the things I would like to investigate in all of this is terminology. One reason we're having a terrible time is because there are too many levels of "Jewelry". If you're making baubles that are to be sold cheaply at a store in Sausalito, we call that jewelry. If you're a gem cutter but you're working for Van Cleef or Harry Winston, that's another form of jewelry making. "Jewelry" is like "Painting" - it doesn't tell you much anymore. We're talking about someone who supposedly has something to say and is using jewelry as a medium for expression.

"I definitely think that Sandra Enterline's Melon necklace is going to become an iconic object, as is Helen Shirk's bracelet; perhaps even Susan Wood-Onstad's hair ornament which is easily overlooked - it's small, but God is it gorgeous. Sandra Enterline's Melon necklace is just so incredibly erotic. It looks all mechanical, pristine, clean, calculated, and predetermined, yet it looks organic. It's like a seed from an out-of-Earth organism! The way it hangs, so low, it makes you very much aware of the body."

MR: I'd like to ask you one of the questions you posed to panelists at the symposium: have you found jewelry makers in particular lack the ability to talk about their work and their craft with any compelling articulation? Is there a correlation between one's ability as an artist and one's ability to articulate a position or convictions? Is it necessary to talk intelligently about one's work?

KT: Yes, it is necessary. Here's a famous line from a dear friend of mine, an editor, who once said, "I can edit bad writing. I can't edit bad thinking." conception is thought and often, the correlation between thought and the ability to articulate that thought shows up when you find something not well thought out, therefore not well defined when you try to speak about it.

I was struck the day I heard Robert Ebendorf speak about his jewelry. He was very moving. His articulation matched his conceptions. Bruce Metcalf too. There is a correspondence between the ability to discuss what you're doing and what you're doing. Some artists can't articulate because they have nothing to say.

In my sophomore year of undergraduate school, a professor once told me that "One day you'll be able to discern conviction," and I thought, "Right." It's true, though. Conviction, by the way, is the one criteria I am looking for in a work of art, conviction being: I have a story, a point to make, and here's what I want to say. I like an artist to be somewhat intellectual, to think, to be connected to the world, to get out of the studio, to have wit. That's what strikes me today - how witless, how unconnected so many people are, how humorless. Or, the awful thing is that our humor is usually connected to just ghastly things: violence, or hurting somebody.

MR: Which qualities unique to jewelry make it appealing to you as an art form?

KT: We don't wear a pot, we don't wear our dishes or our furniture - some of us don't (laughter). The very act of wearing can have its own liberating forces. If you can say a lot in a small area, so that the piece is always alive and constantly telling new stories, constantly engaging people in dialogue or thought, that can be exciting. Think of it - you can reduce some profound statement to the size of a brooch or pendant you can wear, and it can say as much as a huge fresco, a Barnett Newman or Kenneth Noland painting. You can get the same power of imagination, the same power of intensity.

To me, John Iversen's enamel pieces are miraculous in that they brought you into a world of color - as though the body, physically, could enter the piece and then you were in a world of blue. Visually, you're just soaked up in blue.

Roberta Williamson's brooch with the boat, water, and the pencil on the leaf served as a small trigger to me. It triggered all of the river scenes that I remember from my years in Ohio, where I would often go down to the Little Miami River. There was the same quality of water; there's a wonderful, gentle quality to the landscape that's so overlooked, overpowered by the majesty of the Sierras and the Rockies. In a work of jewelry she has taken a world slice, reduced it to that (the brooch), and for her and for anyone else who's experienced a river like that in the Midwest, you go from the specific - the brooch - to the general, and that general encompasses all sorts of feelings. So jewelry is like a light switch - it turns on all these emotions and remembrances - nostalgia, fear, anger, hurt, thought, puzzlement.

I have people ask me if I have a typed up list of criteria for the selection of a work of art. No! There are some guidelines, but ultimately what I'm looking for is some reaction. All art to me is telling a story. That doesn't mean I have to know what the story is, but it has to have something that makes me want to come back and look at it. Often I'm looking at a work of art or an object and I'm thinking, "Talk to me, speak to me, come on, what's wrong?" And it's not speaking because it has nothing to say.

"This is just the most gorgeous form - it's a sterling silver neckpiece in which the whole thing has beentwisted in the center - this sumptuous twist. He's treating metal like a piece of gum, but it's turned and handled with such knowledge of the material, such conviction of "I know what I'm doing and here it is." Not at all timid. He made a statement, and he didn't have to go any further with it - there's nothing extraneous here."

I'm looking for a visceral reaction. If an object has only cleverness going for it, it wears thin, like the old one-liner - after a while, so what? I look at technique - technically, are you accomplished; conceptually - are you interesting? Are you a rare bird or a common bird?

Two of the hardest things for an artist to know are when to begin and when to stop. To me that's the mark of a true artist - to have the courage to know when to do those [two things].

MR: In contemporary culture, museums typically are invested with the power to evaluate and validate art. How should they acknowledge contemporary jewelry?

KT: I think there should be a little more risk-taking. Museums are dull, conservative institutions commanded, by and large, by dull, conservative people. (Laughter) I'm serious. Look at boards - look at the controversies we face now. We have a lot of gutless directors, gutless curators who are terrified that a penis or a vagina is going to get in the wrong hands, (no pun intended), that it's going to be seen by the wrong person.

What an awful thing; we deny our sexuality we deny our bodies, we deny our death - the great taboo in this culture. Why the hesitancy? Why the trouble? I'm questioning museums as a gay white guy beginning to question my institution - I don't think I fit in them anymore. I don't want to paint myself as this romantic outsider, but I don't find that my desires, needs, and wishes seem to be so far out of the mainstream. And then I look at people of color and what they are asking for - and to me, multiculturalism comes down to this - people asking to be invited to the table; that's all it is. Without any explanation or justification of why you're there. Why aren't you there? Not to be a token - that's an extremely offensive thing, to be a token. So, expanding that, museums should not just be collecting jewelry, they should be paying attention to all this wonderful artistic creativity out there - in fiber, in ceramics, in furniture.

Today I was reading something that so distressed me, 1987 and 1988 reviews of "The Eloquent Object". Some of them struck me as the reviewer really writing so that he or she could read the writing later and think, "Am I not a clever intellectual?" because they were mean - gratuitously nasty without a point. This leads back to the persons making decisions about what enters a museum collection. By what authority are the decisions being made? I'd like to expand our perimeters.

MR: How has "Jewels and Gems" bean received?

KT: It's amazing what people reveal about themselves in their comments or their questions. The positive comments about this whole exhibition have been encouraging and at the same time, they've revealed to me people must have thought this was going to be just one dumb little show. I don't think they had any idea what contemporary jewelry is like. How do you get past these stereotypes?

The most delightful, the wittiest, the most engaging, articulate, compelling, thoughtful, provoking jewelry being done is being done by people who have actually thought about something other than jewelry. They are bringing into their work a full life. They have not compartmentalized their life, "I'm a Jewelry Maker here and a Mother here or a Father here, et cetera." The world is brought into their work and you see something being said by people who read, who think, who are much bigger than themselves and out in the world, listening to people.

MR: What points did you want to make u:ith this exhibition?

"Some of Susan Kingsley's pieces will be those iconic pieces. Venus of Violent Verdure is just so stimulating, so suggestive of floral sprays from the nineteenth century. At "first you think, Oh, the ultimate in sentimentality," and then you start to realize, "Oh my God, those are Venus fly traps - ewww!" It definitely says, "Don't touch me!" yet it's a brooch; brooches supposedly attract the viewer yet this is an item that repels - I love that quality about it. I love her use of form and color. Then you find all of these exaggerated hairs on the fly traps themselves. You're wearing something quite three-dimensional that goes beyond the wearer, interfering with the space of someone else out there, and the whole idea is entrapment - the Venus fly trap lives off of other organisms. One of the comments she's making with this piece is about human relationships."

KT: The first point that I wanted the exhibition to make was that we collect jewelry. Besides exhibiting it, the second point is that we are collecting it - the operative being on the active - it's not a collection that's formed, it's a collection that is in formation. And I guess a third one is that a collection is really nothing more than a revelation. It's a process of making known what has been done, what is being done, who's working in California, who's not in the collection - so people will tell me, kindly, I hope, "Perhaps you might want to include this individual or these people." My call for information at the symposium is producing a few results, let's hope that continues. Right now it's a tracking process.

Something else I did that I want to get out to the public is I added the work of some people that might be questionable. Heidi Nahser, for example - she's just beginning. I believed in the piece, and I also thought it was good to encourage her. Peter Macchiarini, on the other hand, is an old timer, born in 1909. His work looks retrogressive, shall I say, passé? He's still designing in an idiom from the 50's and before; do you ignore this person? Is it charity? I don't know - it's not all neat and clean.

MR: Are there any particular traits that reoccur or that have developed progressively over the fifty year period represented by this collection?

KT: I guess the marked feature of the collection, apart from the De Patta collection, is diversity. It seems to be a common theme in all craft. I don't sense a collective vision - I can't look at Arline Fisch's students 'work and say, "Here's a group of pieces obviously made by Fisch students." I don't see that there's a distinct San Jose State or San Diego State or Long Beach State aesthetic. In fact, you could just take this whole exhibition and put it in Florida and call it "Florida Jewelry" and probably it wouldn't look terribly out of place.

People usually aren't in a place long enough for the place to have influence on them; influence is coming from their peers, mentors, their teachers - but even their teachers are being influenced by someone else, by what they see in books. Today an artist is free to follow no particular tenet, no particular individual. Contemporary students have some need to break away and stake their own territory, so that their work doesn't look like anyone else's - that seems to be considered a terrible thing today although it used to be part of a learning process.

"Quite frankly, I don't know how I feel about Kent Raible's pieces. We spent quite a poke o' dough on those (laughter). Which is good. Does that mean they shouldn't be in the collection? I think they probably are suffering because I'm as much colored as anybody else by the contemporary inclination away from such sumptuous materials and such beautiful colors. This craftsmanship is impeccable, exquisite, refined! Why should those qualities work against the piece? For me, they work for it."

MR: Do you see any correlation between the Arts and Crafts Movement in California and the contemporary jewelry that's made here today?

KT: I think there's a continuation of craft activity in California that's misunderstood; the break between the First World War, the Depression and the Second World War was not quite as clean as we've always thought it to be. What we're looking at is really an inheritance, without the people knowing that they are the progeny of Arts and Crafts practitioners.

The Arts and Crafts movement was an attempt by individuals to work in certain media, or several, collectively, often toward common goals, organizing in guilds to promote, sell and discuss their work. In a way, the university has become that context. It is now a major patron of the craft movement. So many of the people in this exhibition have received formal artistic training on a university level - that's a phenomenon that you didn't find at the turn of the century - but they're still plying their talents, their creative energies, to work in materials and expressions that fall out of the so-called mainstream of "real art".

There's a reality about the objects that I deal with that often strikes me with a force that I don't get with painting or photography. The unfortunate thing about showing jewelry in the museum context is it goes dead. These pieces demand to be held and touched and felt - they are understood more by touch than they are by sight. For example, in Sandra Enterline's donut bracelet, the musical quality of the movable parts is lost. The pachinko balls in Abrasha's bracelet are static. The jingly jangly musical quality of Ebendorf's necklace is lost. You don't feel the weight of Kent Raible's earrings or his pendants, so that the qualities of jewelry are now being shown statically as though they were paintings; they were never intended to be as static as we are showing them. It's a dilemma we face in a museum context.

MR: What pieces in "Jewels and Gems" do you consider to be pivotal?

KT: I don't consider any of them to be pivotal except, perhaps the Margaret De Patta collection, simply because it is now gaining international recognition. The very first photography request I had when I came here in '84 was for a 4″ x 5″ transparency of a pendant made in 1956. That's one of the gems, no pun intended, of our collection. So the De Patta collection is pivotal in that it's by one individual spanning thirty plus years, and it constitutes a discreet entity that can be studied as a collection.

MR: Did the Oakland Museum's jewelry collection actually begin with the gift of the De Patta collection?

KT: We might have had a few pieces come in before this, but the collection really began in the '60s. Now my response might strike some as strange but we're really dealing with a recent phenomenon - we're dealing with a movement that's as old as I am. In 1943, what's now the American Craft Council was founded in New York. It's not like we have this depth and breadth and scope of history. I think that a call for us to be included into the hallowed halls of art is perhaps premature. We may not have collectively paid our dues, and sometimes I wonder, do we actually want to go into the halls? There's a wonderful French proverb which I absolutely love, "Beware of what you wish for…"

MR: …you might get it. What feedback have you had about this exhibition? How would you like to see the collection develop?

KT: The response to the symposium and to the collection has been more encouraging than I had any right to expect. It is a non-budget exhibition - that means we weren't even publicizing it. We put some objects from the permanent collection in this space and quietly let the public discover them. From the symposium, some people have called saying they would like to help us. I keep saying that with $5000 a year over a ten year period - we could add, easily, fifty pieces. Maybe that's too ambitious but I think we could.

I'd like to see the collection develop substantially. One of the things we did was add contemporary pieces - many of them made within this year or last. I want to drop back, pick up the historical material, and within ten years have the collection catalogued. I hope to have a document written saying, "Here is what I was hoping to do," so an individual doesn't come in looking at all the objects in a vacuum - so there's some history in what we were trying to do with this history. That goal has to be fulfilled by raising the money to be able to do it.

This was a one-time event. I do want to emphasize throughout this interview that this was a miracle. I couldn't do the same thing for furniture or hollowware.

"Abrasha's bracelet is intellectually demanding - for the same reasons that I find Sandra's Melon necklace wonderful - the mechanical quality to it, the intellectual thought that has gone into it. It's cold and crisp and clean."

MR: What do the contemporary jewelry community and museums have to offer each other? What manner and level of interaction is possible, desirable? How might each enhance the other?

KT: Frequently I have artists who come to me who feel they've been dismissed and overlooked - you know, it works both ways. Don't hold your curators responsible for a lack of representation in museums - support your curators and start to work on the powers that be who make the decisions. Curators are not omnipotent. Often people have made comments to me that lead me to think that they believe I am in total control of everything I do. My God, I wish I were - this place would be 10,000 times more exciting, (laughing) even if I say so.

So you've got to - one - educate yourselves about museums. Two, make yourselves known. And don't be part of the problem, if you sit back, never make an effort to get your work known - I'm not saying into a collection, I'm saying known. Help to identify patrons that would be willing to support a purchase or a gift. The artist often has rapport with the clients that the curator doesn't. You know your client, I know my patrons who might be interested in jewelry.

SNAG could become much more actively involved in getting collections and getting works of art into institutions. We aren't talking about Titians or Picassos or Rodins; we're talking about a few thousand of dollars. SNAG could work with some institutions to help form some travelling exhibitions. Our director would be very receptive to that.

Let me end with this: as small as "Jewels and Gems" is in terms of space there are over on hundred pieces in the exhibition; it's huge. It's an exhibition with really no budget, yet the amount of publicity it's garnering, this positive response… just think what could be done with an exhibition with a substantial catalogue, a lecture series, a budget to promote it.

I think we Americans, so many of us, have fallen into a mode that someone else will fight for my rights, someone else will guarantee that my most basic civil rights are not violated or taken away. Somebody else will see that my work gets into a museum collection; somebody else will see that the exhibition is formed; well, sometimes there ain't no somebody else.

Mija Riedel is an artist and writer who lives in San Francisco, California.

By Mija Riedel

Metalsmith Magazine – 1995 Winter

In association with SNAG‘s

Metalsmith magazine, founded in 1980, is an award winning publication and the only magazine in America devoted to the metal arts.