Now in its 11th year, MAD About Jewelry has returned for what organizers and participating artists are calling a kind of holiday edition of its annual contemporary jewelry pop-up show and sale that benefits New York’s Museum of Arts and Design.
The event, which opens Tuesday to the public, features an in-person show and an online sale that raises funds to support the museum’s participating artists and its educational programs, says MAD About Jewelry longtime director and curator Bryna Pomp. The show and sale continue through Dec. 11.
“The most important classification in the museum’s permanent collection is, in fact, jewelry. We are the only museum in America devoted permanently to contemporary jewelry,” Pomp says. “In support of that major commitment to this field, we hold this selling exhibition annually so that people can meet makers of contemporary jewelry and engage in conversation with these makers about their techniques, process, and materials, and acquire pieces directly from them.”
This year, Pomp says she invited about 50 “creative, innovative” artists to participate in the fundraising event. Normally, MAD About Jewelry is held in April, but the museum had to cancel the 2020 event. This year, organizers decided to move forward with this holiday edition, which celebrates U.S. makers with a diversity of backgrounds and who work in a wide array of materials, Pomp says.
“Every edition [of MAD About Jewelry] is a real mix of materials, and I love that,” Pomp says. “That’s what I look for in every single edition—I always want to have a solid component of makers working in metals like gold and silver but also in brass, bronze, aluminum, and titanium.”
Artists also are highlighting how they use recycled materials this year, including everything from glass to plastic to skateboards. Even beloved childhood toy Legos show up in this year’s exhibit, Pomp says. Many classic art forms that become jewelry also are part of the show, such as jade carving, but in a contemporary way.
This year’s MAD About Jewelry participating artists include Carly Owens, Jen Smith, Wyna Liu, Tara Locklear, MoAna Luu, Patricia Madeja, Emanuela Duca, Griffith Evans, Xinia Guan, Danielle Gori-Montanelli, Jade Gedeon, Stephanie Dubsky, Ben Dory, and many others.
Glass expert Amy Lemaire is one of the participating artists in this year’s exhibit. She is known for her flame blowing, which is a scientific kind of glassblowing that is known for its precision as well as its beautiful functionality, Lemaire says. Lemaire is a 2015 MAD artist in residence and is part of its alumni council as well.
For this show, Lemaire brought out her glass beadwork, a practice that she says is central to her creative process. Every culture has a kind of bead that is used both in practical ways, such as for bartering, as well as for art or jewelry, Lemaire says. A fan of bold accessories, Lemaire says she enjoys making and teaching about glass as wearable jewelry and art.
For MAD About Jewelry, Lemaire included a necklace fashioned after pollen, creating beads that replicate what pollen looks like in real life. She sees pollen as a way to communicate not only her skills but also how concepts move from person to person.
“In this case, the pollen has to do with spreading ideas into the world,” Lemaire says. “Plants reproduce by spreading pollen, and I think of my beads as having those characteristics. With beads, there are ideas about cultural worth, value, and the technology used to make the beads. There’s a lot of information you can get from that one small object.”
Lemaire has used her beads as a tool in her own life, bartering them like money for everyday things she needed at the time. During that period, she was nomadic, and her beads had to be pocket size so she could travel with them. This use of beads as a unit of currency was an experiment that informed her art then and now.
“People agree that something has value and trade it—so a bead was the same thing as money. It doesn’t have a fixed value—it changes. We think of it as stationary, but it fluctuates daily,” Lemaire says. “There’s a lot of power in that because you get to assert the value of an object. It really made me think about the value of other currencies and how they are connected.”
Top: The work of Amy Lemaire, a teacher and glassblower, who is one of the participating jewelry-makers helping to raise funds for the Museum of Arts and Design in New York (all photos courtesy of MAD About Jewelry)
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