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Tne Patina Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico is the place to be over the next few weeks if you love German silver jewelry.  The gallery is an international destination for collectors and connoisseurs of contemporary hand fabricated jewelry, textiles, and sculptural objects in metal, clay and wood by leading American and European artists.

Their website routinely has jewelry exhibits, with many online details and photos, and is a fascinating place to spend a few hours, with a cup of coffee, exploring the various artists which they feature.

The gallery has been running a fabulous exhibit which will end on September 5, 2010, and which features the remarkable works of a German master, Michael Zobel. This will be the ninth return engagement by the Atelier and as always, it is eagerly anticipated.

The website says of Michael that The jewelry of Atelier Zobel redefines metalsmithing. Through a painterly use of metals and selection of gems, the Atelier emphatically elevates jewelry into the realm of fine art. 

The bracelet shown here is made from Oxidized Sterling Silver, 22k and 24k Gold, Turquoise, and Coral, with Champagne Colored Diamonds. It has a value of $16,085. You can view more items from their exhibit on this page of the Patina Gallery website.

Tiime to show off.  Do you have a jewelry collection that you would like to share with others? My friends at Collector's  Weekly emailed me yesterday. They are particularly looking for interesting vintage jewelry items of good quality for their fine jewelry pages.

Show and Tell works in the following way: You upload up to four high-resolution photos, and then write as much as you want about the history or stories behind each item as you wish. You can also track your favorites, and post comments and questions. You can find more details here about uploading photos here.

This part of the site is not for those trying to sell jewelry. It's meant to be display only. Think of it as a shared virtual museum. Show and Tell is free and they make it very easy for you to sign up and upload your photos.

If you do upload your collection, please let me know here in the comments and I'll link to your photos in an upcoming post on my blog.

S.J. Phillips, a noted antiques and silver dealer in London, England will soon have an exhibit called “Brilliant Impressions: Antique Paste & Other Jewelry,” which will run from June 15 to June 29, 2010.  The exhibit will showcase 146 pieces of paste, “Vauxhall glass” and semiprecious jewels.  The show is meant to  tell the tale of  how women who wished to live the high style, but didn't have the sufficient means,  adorned themselves in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries with fabulous fakes.

The exhibit will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue written by Diana Scarisbrick, a world-renowned jewelry historian,

Paste jewellery has been used since ancient times, when craftsmen discovered that glass could provide a wonderful substitute for the splendour of expensive gemstone jewelry. It was particularly popular in the Middle Ages, when wealth was often expressed by the possession of valuable gold and precious stone jewelry.   Paste jewelry even appears in the collections of Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, and other notable European rulers.

Many of the pieces in the exhibition would be indistinguishable from today’s statement jewels, and include a Carmen Miranda-esque pair of girandole pink and white paste earrings that date to the early 18th century, and a dramatic bib necklace of bullet-shaped beads composed of French jet, the black glass version of the organic gem that once littered the shores of Whitby, in north-eastern England.

You can view a comprehensive press release about the exhibit and about paste jewelry in general, written by Sue Bond in this press release.

American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity is the first Costume Institute exhibition drawn from the newly established Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It will explore developing perceptions of the modern American woman from 1890 to 1940 and how they have affected the way American women are seen today.

The exhibit focuses on archetypes of American femininity through dress, the exhibition will reveal how the American woman initiated style revolutions that mirrored her social, political, and sexual emancipation. "Gibson Girls," "Bohemians," and "Screen Sirens," among others, helped lay the foundation for today's American woman.

Of particular interest to me is the fabulous vintage jewelry that is exhibited as adornment for the fashions that the exhibit is featuring. 

I found a wonderful write up of the exhibit in woman's fashion section of the New York Times by Lori Ettlinger Gross. The years covered by the exhibition are 1890 to 1940, which were also some of the most innovative in vintage jewelry design.  This NY times photo of Mae West in Diamond Lil wearing Beaux-Art jewels gives a good idea of the fashion and jewelry of the period.

For those of you who can't be at the MET for the display, here is a YouTube video with some highlights.  (warning for those who read this blog at work:  Sound is embedded in the video.)

The exhibit opened on May 5, 2010 and will run intil August 15, 2010. 

If you will be in California this week, the San Francisco Museum has an exhibit which is called Designers on Jewelry: 12 years of Jewelry Production.

The exhibit was produced by a Dutch jewelry designer named Gijs Bakker, who has as his aim a desire to move past the conventional concept of simple decoration and an investment in gold or stones, and to redefine the value of jewelry by the fineness of the idea, not the materials.

This exhibit features over 50 artists from New Zealand, Asia and across Europe and seems to ask the question “What is Luxury?”, with the answers being found in a chain of gold nuggets and “Rituals” in a porcelain wishbone necklace, to name a few.

There are over 80 thought-provoking pieces on display, this exhibit will be an interesting stop over if you will be in San Francisco this week. The exhibit ends on May 16, 2010. You can see a walk through tour with details of the exhibit at this page of the Museum's website

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Facere Jewelry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington is currently running an exhibit called Transmutations: Material Reborn.  The exhibit celebrates 27 international jewelry artists who transform plastics (materials that include resin, latex, rubber, vinyl, and thermoplastics)into wearable art. This exhibition was curated by Susan Kasson Sloan, juror of the recent Lark Books publication '500 Plastic Jewelry Designs.'  The show will end May 17, 2010.

The exhibit includes jewelry meant for everyday adornment, as well as those that are meant to make a statement. There is jewelry produced by using high technology Computer Aided Design or CAD and Rapid Prototyping - 3-dimensional printing in ABS Plastic. Some even use plastic Lego toy parts and jewelry made of found objects in varied combinations.

Afer the Seattle show at the Facere Gallery, the exhibit will then travel to Gallery Loupe in Montclair, NJ.   For more details, please visit this page of the Facere Gallery Site.  Here are a few pieces that I found interesting.

Emiko Oye Necklace in repurposed Lego, rubber cording, and sterling silver.

Jocelyn Kolb Maelstrom' Brooch in photosensitive resins and epoxy resin.

An estimated 2500 people attended the opening night of SOFA, NY.   Sculpture Objects & Functional Art  - SOFA, for short, is considered one of the foremost fairs for masterworks bridging contemporary decorative, fine art and design.  The fair was held at the Park Avenue Armory in NY, and enjoyed buoyant sales and steady crowds throughout the whole show - April 15 to April 19, 2010.

Two points of interest to jewelry fans were the Ornamentem exhibit and also the lecture of the psychoanalytic mechanisms behind jewelry wearing, sponsored by Art Jewelry Forum and Sociiety of North American Goldsmiths.  

Among the objects sold was this bone antler and antique ivory necklace by Jennifer Trask, priced at $14,000.  The piece is certainly not something one sees every day around a woman's neck!

Stay tuned for details of the next SOFA show, which will take place in Santa Fe, New Mexico later this summer.

One of my favorite things to do is visit museums which have jewelry exhibits of some sort.  Of course, I am not always on vacation or traveling, and the opportunity doesn't often present itself. But not to worry - there are exciting virtual exhibits online on many websites.

One fascinating exhibit that I came across recently is called The Golden Graves.  This fabulous virtual exhibit features an array of precious objects from the ancient kingdom of Colchis, in what is today known as the Republic of Georgia. The excavation of a series of rich burials and other discoveries at the city of Vani have revealed a highly developed culture that had its own religious and artistic practices, yet also embraced and adapted influences from neighboring peoples

Highlights of the exhibition include  jewelry that display the talent and skill of local goldworkers. ritual figurines, and a life-size bronze torso. In addition, four bronze lamps that were discovered in 2007 are being displayed together in the exhibition for the first time. 

If you are inerested in primitive artifacts and gold jewelry, this exhibit will be of interest to you.  You can take a tour of the exhbit on this page of the Farlang website.

I love the ethnic look of Southwestern Jewelry.  The combination of sterling silver and gemstones such as turquoise and coral is stunning in design and appeals to the Taurus in me that loves all things "earthy."

The Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, New Mexico, allows visitors to enjoy outstanding historical collections of Native American jewelry, as well as pottery, paintings and weavings.

The museum currently has a lovely exhibit of Historic Native American and Pueblo jewelry, which was collected by Ms. Rogers during her years in New Mexico.  It has more than 1,200 pieces of jewelry, which represent traditions of the Southwest, including Native American and Hispanic influences.

This exhibit is a permanent exhibition of the museum, so if you planning a trip to Taos, New Mexico this summer, a visit to the museum will be a nice addition to your itinerary if you also enjoy this style of jewelry.

Photo credit:  Millicent Rogers Museum.

If you are a fan of bakelite jewelry, as so many vintage jewelry collectors are, you should head to Yonkers, NY some time between now and June 6. 

To those of you who think of radios and furniture when you hear the word bakelite, then you also would have a treat in store if you are near this new exhibit.

Leo Hendrik Baekeland invented the plastic called Bakelite in his Yonkers laboratory in 1907.  And now, the Hudson River Museum,  in Yonkers, will bring, for the first time, more than 300 rare objects made from Bakelite and the more modern melamine.  The exhibition, is called  Bakelite in Yonkers: Pioneering the Age of Plastics, will be on view through June 6, 2010.

The exhibit includes the promotion of plastic products in vintage advertisements, 1930s film footage illustrating the Bakelite process and Art Deco and contemporary jewelry. The exhibition is drawn from the holdings of the Amsterdam Bakelite® Collection which includes some 4,000 objects owned by Reindert Groot, a Netherlands producer and director, as well as that of Hugh Karraker, a great grandson of Leo Baekeland; the Yonkers Historical Society; and other private collections.

Bakelite jewelry has risen in value in the vintage jewelry world and, of course, this gives rise to all sorts of fake products and reproductions.  I've written an article in my bakelite resource library to help you to identiry if your jewelry is actually bakelite, or the mass produced product called fakelite.

For more information on bakelite in general, you might enjoy this interesting YouTube video made in Amsterdam.