Shows & Tales

Art Jewelry Forum is seeking support for their next publication, Shows & Tales.

What’s This Book About?
Shows & Tales explores how we look at art jewelry through its exhibitions. Our approach to this topic is threefold. The first contributors will examine the landmark art jewelry exhibitions to plot the evolution of the field. What were they? Where were they? What did they look like? What did they contribute to the culture then and now? The second section exposes the challenges of curating craft through essays and discussions with top arts professionals. What are the obstacles and rewards of exhibiting art jewelry? How do they do their jobs? The final act is a collection of recent reviews that question exhibition experimentation and display strategies.

Why Is This Book Important?
While the topic of exhibition making occupies an ever more important place in art theory, there has never been a publication on the subject with jewelry as its focus. Shows & Tales aims to remedy this absence. The book will provide an historical overview of jewelry exhibitions, an understanding of the challenges in showing jewelry in public spaces, and insight into what curation can do to jewelry objects. Shows & Tales aims to help professional and amateur curators articulate the relative importance of selection, mediation, and experience design, and question their assumptions about display conventions.

Who’s Writing it?
Some of the world’s leading jewelry thinkers have already signed on! Scheduled contributors include (final list to be announced soon): Glenn Adamson (USA), Sarah Archer (USA), Jivan Astfalck (DE/UK), Lizzie Atkins (UK), David Beytelmann (AR/FR), Gabriel Craig (USA), Susan Cummins (USA), Liesbeth den Besten (NL), Mònica Gaspar (SP/CH), Toni Greenbaum (USA), Marthe Le Van (USA), Benjamin Lignel (FR), Jennifer Navva Milliken (IL/USA), Kellie Riggs (USA), Damian Skinner (NZ), Cindi Strauss (USA), Valeria Vallarta Siemelink (MX/NL), Meredith Turnbull (AU), Jorunn Veiteberg (NO), Namita Gupta Wiggers (USA).

What’s It Going to Look Like?
Shows & Tales will be a 200-page paperback book with flaps and full-color illustrations. The book will be edited and designed by Benjamin Lignel.

IF we are lucky enough to get your support and funds that are in excess of our need for this book - they will go directly to the Publication Committee to be used for paying writers for AJF articles and planning future projects.

Risks and challenges
The single challenge of this project is to get the book in the hands of its intended readership on time. (Being naturally optimistic, and possibly slightly presumptuous, we have no doubt that, when it actually gets there, it will be love at first and second sight.)

We have set ourselves the challenge of producing the book in time for Schmuck 2015, the yearly international "meet" that sees throngs of contemporary jewelry lovers cross mountains, oceans, and their legs, to gather in Munich, Germany.

This means editing, proofreading, and laying out roughly 28 essays, reviews, and articles written by 17 writers from 10 different countries. And obtaining images (and permission to use them) relating to exhibitions that happened, in some cases, more than 50 years ago. It also means doing all that in exactly five months (including delivery to Munich), with a budget that is tighter than the White House security.

However, this is our second time working under such conditions, and this improbable chain—from far-flung writers to printed page—is supported by AJF’s editorial dream team of Ben Lignel and Nathalie Mornu and the superlative production capacities of Faenza, our Italian printer. (They delivered our last publication within 12 days of receiving our PDFs. If you have not printed a book before, this is ridiculous.)

Behind this first publishing platoon stands the wider AJF support system: Susan Cummins, our standard bearer, Marthe Le Van (who keeps our social networks alive and our readers keen), Sienna Patti (who put this Kickstarter campaign together, and makes sure we can actually pay Faenza), the publication committee (who listens to Ben’s pitches with benevolent criticality), our donors (who have already pledged $1500 towards the production of articles – bless them) and our wide readership, whose expectations we strive to outdo.

All told, this should prove to be a walk in the park.