An Argument for the Narrative

Early experts in the field, such as the British authors Ralph Turner and Peter Dormer, had been hard-pressed to establish a definition. In their seminal book from 1985, The New Jewelry: Trends and Traditions, Dormer and Turner described narrative jewelry rather moderately, as “figurative … occasionally [used] to make … social or political commentary.”¹ In the Netherlands, narrative jewelry wasn’t a consideration until the Museum Het Kruithuis mounted American Dreams, American Extremes and then Beauty Is a Story, in 1990 and 1991, respectively, which included Dutch, Belgian, Austrian, British, and German makers, along with American.² In his 2007 PhD thesis, “Contemporary European Narrative Jewellery,” Scottish jeweler Jack Cunningham admits that “narrative jewelry” has thus far been hard to define, offering a general, rather broad-based, explication: “A wearable object that contains a commentary or message which the maker, by means of visual representation, has the overt intention to communicate to an audience through the intervention of the wearer.”³

For me, a piece of jewelry is narrative if it possesses a specificity of imagery or juxtaposition of materials that aim—whether directly or discreetly—to tell a story, indulge in a fantasy, relate an experience, refer to an event or locale, or make a topical statement. American jeweler Bruce Metcalf, who regards his own output as “narrative symbolism,” states that for jewelry to be considered narrative “there must be context, character(s), arc, and (ideally) consequence.”⁴ New Zealand art historian Damian Skinner views narrative jewelry as “jewelry that explores the challenges of representing a time-based story or scenario charged with meaning within the object itself, using figurative images.”⁵

Regrettably, narrative jewelry has had to endure an uphill battle to win the universal favor it enjoys today. Perhaps the story-telling position was deemed too obvious, the oftentimes impertinent images too provocative. Maybe the rejection of elegant design and abstract ideas was offensive to the European sensibility. As the director of Museum Het Kruithuis Yvònne G. J. M. Joris wrote in the catalog accompanying Beauty Is a Story, in the 1960s and 1970s the design and choice of materials for jewelry “were purely conceptual. Anything personal or emotional was taboo: what counted was cool logic, calm calculation, straight lines and geometric shapes.”⁶ In the same catalog, design critic Gert Staal stated, “A few years ago [jewelry with a story] would have been unthinkable in connection with an exhibition of modern west European jewellery. The story—then preferably described by the term ‘anecdote’—was an arch-enemy of jewellery. It was part of the jewellers’ guilty conscience that they ever functioned as illustrators.”⁷ Although typically regarded as an American phenomenon, I’m not sure it was the profusion of American narrative jewelry alone that accounts for this newfound international recognition. European jewelers came to their own conclusions by experimenting with the narrative format independently, thereby realizing its expressive potential.
 
To better understand narrative jewelry’s trajectory, I’d like to briefly touch upon the field’s nascent years, on both sides of the Atlantic, before concentrating on the American narrative works in Susan Beech’s collection. European studio jewelry—at least during the period immediately following World War II—has been habitually regarded as abstract, displaying a nonobjective formalism, compositional harmony, and/or experimental surface treatment while maintaining traditional jewelry-making materials and methods. European studio jewelers saw themselves bound by the tenets of modernism, which shed light on their pursuit of a purist aesthetic, whereas American makers relied, instead, on a mélange of styles. As Joris boldly states, “America lacks a coherent cultural history vis-à-vis European art. … American art was cradled in an anthropological melting pot, rooted in its own continent but with deep traditions in Africa, South and Central America, Europe, and Asia.”⁸

Additionally, most European studio jewelers were trained by fine jewelers under the apprenticeship system, which explains their reliance on metal, gemstones, and enamel. Unlike their European counterparts, those wishing to study jewelry-making in the United States were dependent upon occupational-therapy classes for returning war veterans, some of which included metalsmithing, or general adult-education craft courses offered in select high schools and colleges; many were self-taught. American studio jewelry, at the time, ran the stylistic gamut, with makers who wished to forge a new expression turning to ethnography, along with the tropes of modern art—primarily Cubism, Constructivism, and Surrealism, the last epitomized by the phantasmagorical creatures of Sam Kramer such as Cyclops (1946). Here, a single figure speaks volumes, even though its story doesn’t include supporting characters or sites. Such an evocative work allows for individual interpretation, conjuring a different tale for each person who engages with it. The figure’s bizarre form may suggest a fetus to some, or a grotesque monster to others and, considering the year of its making, just after the end of World War II, perhaps a body mutilated by the detonation of an atom bomb.

Despite reluctance on the part of stalwart formalists, by the late 1960s European narrative jewelry had begun to evolve, and it did not emerge from a vacuum. There were historical precedents, along with fledgling examples, being made in Europe during the mid-twentieth century. In fact, narrative jewelry has existed in Europe since ancient times. For example, Roman and Byzantine betrothal/wedding rings featured chased profiles of couples gazing lovingly at one another. Medieval guild members wore identifying badges with narrative references to their associations, and didactic enamel images of Christ and his disciples were common in the Christian world during the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque eras, when most parishioners were illiterate. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries secretive lovers wore brooches with tiny paintings of one another’s eyes, and rings and brooches were mounted with memorial scenes drawn with hair. In the early twentieth century, continental Art Nouveau and British Arts and Crafts jewelry featured enamelwork depicting myths and legends. And in 1941 Salvador Dalí began to design jewels, appropriating motifs from his surreal paintings, which were fabricated by jeweler Carlos Alemany. Other fine artists, such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Max Ernst, followed suit, designing narrative jewelry that was also made by professional goldsmiths.

The trend continued and, in fact, expanded. German sculptor and jeweler Herbert Zeitner rebelled against the geometric abstraction of the Bauhaus as early as the 1920s and, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, created silver brooches depicting enigmatic women’s faces. Beginning in 1966 German jeweler Eberhard Burgel fabricated brooches from thin sheets of gold and carved ivory illustrating historical and mythical themes, as well as celebrated personalities. At about the same time another German, Reinhold Reiling, who possessed a sculptural preoccupation with the human form, added jewelry designs featuring photoetched images of individuals, as well as linear profiles engraved on gold, to his otherwise nonrepresentational output.

Czech-born German Hubertus von Skal, who perceived jewelry as totems that attract the eye through signs and symbols, concocted a brooch featuring a cast gold fly poised on a window screen, followed by others portraying tiny, realistically rendered male figures in business suits situated within surreal tableaux; bracelets and rings with moon-like faces; stick pins topped by human heads; and even penises fitted with tiny legs that appear to be scampering after potential partners. In 1973 Marion Herbst and Karel Niehorster, along with other experimental Dutch jewelers, founded the B.O.E. group—Union of Rebellious Goldsmiths—poised to revolutionize jewelry by challenging the reductivist aesthetic imposed by De Stijl in favor of creative freedom.⁹ They also investigated new materials, such as steel, aluminum, and plastic. Herbst created a brooch from silver and acrylic that depicted a place mat with an oversized fork in the process of lifting one corner to reveal hidden “gems,” while Niehorster made two surreal, pillow-like brooches from silver, one bisected with a zippered resin eye, the other by a zippered plastic mouth.

In 1971 Barbara Cartlidge, founder of the groundbreaking Electrum Gallery in London and a staunch proponent of narrative jewelry, created a “toys for adults” series, exemplified by a silver bracelet replete with a miniature gold train that moves around a track, surrounded by golden houses and pine trees. As the 1970s progressed, narrative jewelry was embraced by an increasing number of European studio jewelers. Exemplified by the watershed exhibition Beauty Is a Story, in 1991, narrative jewelry was well on its way to becoming an integral part of the contemporary jewelry canon.
 
As Joris writes, “No country in the world appeals so strongly to the imagination as America … [where] the muses are … unfettered. ‘Freedom’ is probably the sole identifying feature of American art.”¹⁰ The pioneer spirit of America’s Pacific Northwest exemplified such freedom. In the 1950s the city of Seattle was on the cusp of becoming a major center for studio jewelry due to metalsmith and educator Ruth Penington, who introduced metalsmithing into the art program at the University of Washington, in Seattle. This course of study would prove to be one of the most influential programs of its kind in the United States. Penington taught Ramona Solberg, who in turn mentored Laurie Hall, Kiff Slemmons, and Ron Ho, all of whom are included in Susan Beech’s collection. Solberg, the acknowledged master of the “Seattle School,” specialized in jewelry assembled from ethnic, folk, and vintage found objects collected during her extensive travels around the world. The necklace Time Flies (1995), previously owned by Beech and now in the collection of Die Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum in Munich, consists of an antique watch face, what appears to be a walrus ivory object of Inuit origin, and a fly preserved under crystal. Catchy titles, as well as her enchantment with assembled found objects, were likewise adopted by her acolytes.

Like Solberg, Laurie Hall incorporates found objects by indigenous people, folk art, and organic materials, as well as scrap metal and items from popular culture, which she augments with hand-fabricated replicas of everyday things. Where Solberg’s jewelry is an elegant medley of compatible elements, Hall’s displays a clever wit that is sometimes truly funny and often refers directly to her own life. Citing the perennial female quest for male companionship, Hall pays tribute to a teenager she knew as a child, while growing up in Portland, Oregon, in the brooch Available (2003). Hall recalls the girl going downtown to the waterfront to pick up sailors during the Annual Rose Festival, in June, when the naval fleets were in.¹¹ The round blue Plexiglas mounting, upon which a vintage tintype portrait of a young woman wearing Jantzen swimwear—a Portland-based brand—is affixed, is framed by a circle of fabricated silver sailor hats, or perhaps a flotilla of silver sailboats, reminiscent of the toy boats children make from folded paper. These vessels and/or the seamen represented by their caps appear to rotate endlessly around the swimmer’s hopeful visage but never drop anchor, signifying the young woman’s failure to snag a sailor.

Hall’s necklace Watertown (2006) was suggested by the eastern Massachusetts city of the same name, located on the Charles River just west of Boston. Settled in 1630, its name was probably derived from the abundance of water and fish in the area. Hall utilized driftwood to fashion a tugboat in the shape of one that would likely have navigated the Charles, and placed an actual sardine can—decorated with lush images of fish—beneath it. Hall adds emotional impact to her narrative by anthropomorphizing this diminutive castoff, musing that “the sardine can would wish to be along for the ride.”¹² Hall placed steel fragments above the sardine can to depict the river’s current; likewise, silver elements on the portion of the piece that encircles the neck suggest the steam-fueled movement of the tugboat as it chugs down the river. Through the purposeful choice of found, selected, and fabricated materials that reference specific locales, both Available and Watertown convey a powerful sense of place.

Beech is a great fan of the jewelry of Kiff Slemmons, who is represented by ten works in the collection. Although residing in Chicago for many years, Slemmons is still considered a Pacific Northwest jeweler due to her time spent in Seattle as an integral member of the metalsmithing community there. Although she was great friends with Ramona Solberg and considers her a mentor, Slemmons is self-taught in jewelry-making, having originally pursued art and literature at the Sorbonne, and then art and French at the University of Iowa. While Hall’s jewelry is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on popular culture and quotidian life, Slemmons’s tends toward the intellectual, integrating philosophical exposition with lived experience. As a child growing up in rural Iowa, Slemmons spent time in her father’s printing plant, where she came to love words and letters, perceiving in both a poetic as well as physical presence; she frequently incorporates typeset letters into her assemblages. In addition to these, Slemmons has often chosen photographs to tell a story. The multiple images in motion by avant-garde English photographer Eadweard Muybridge hold a particular fascination for her. The necklace Manual Locomotion (1999) is comprised of six contiguous mounted photos of a gloved hand, each manifesting a different gesture, which, when turned upside-down and separated into individual components, function as pull toys. Titles play a significant role in Slemmons’s work.

As with Manual Locomotion, the necklace Coming to Grips (2001) illustrates Slemmons’s love of language, facility with puns, and, in this instance, enchantment with tools. Wrenches, depicted in positive and negative space, are both the subject and object of the necklace, which is made up of ten circular elements, each containing a photograph of a wrench head, with some appearing to grasp a tiny piece of wooden ruler.

Ron Ho, a student of Solberg’s at the University of Washington, was also a seminal figure in the Pacific Northwest jewelry movement. Chinese heritage and a Hawaiian upbringing are the main themes of his autobiographical necklaces. Soil Toil (1998) is a poignant tale about Ho’s paternal grandfather, who immigrated from China in 1878 to work as a tenant farmer in Kula, Hawaii, and subsequently became rich by selling his lima bean crop to the United States government during World War I. The necklace represents Ho’s grandfather’s retirement, as a Chinese-style lattice roof shelters a now purposeless blue field worker’s jacket, and a pair of charms in the guise of two naked feet hover over a bucket of golden lima beans, symbolic of his financial success.

A more politically charged narrative emanated from Central Washington University, in Ellensburg, an epicenter for the counterculture movement of the 1970s and which, like the University of Washington in Seattle, offered a fine metalsmithing program that still operates to this day. Nancy Worden was a young protégé of Funk artist Ken Cory when he was chairman of the metals department there. Her raw, feminist works, several of which, like Cory’s, reference Indigenous American formats as well as social commentary, are exemplified by the necklace Casting Pearls before Swine. Fashioned from Barbie doll arms cast in brass, it is configured like a Sioux bear claw necklace, with each hand holding a pearl—a precious offering to boors, who are unappreciative of human value. The brooch Hidden Agenda (1994), meanwhile, is an example of Worden’s practice of hiding the most telling element of a work from the viewer. In this case, it’s a tiny toy gun, which signifies her anger at right-wing religious groups, animal hunting, and the proliferation of firearms for personal use.
 
Based in Richmond, Virginia, Robin Kranitzky and Kim Overstreet also use assembled found objects in their highly detailed mixed-media brooches. Kranitzky and Overstreet’s collaborations, however, are far more dreamlike than those emerging from the Pacific Northwest. Imago (1999), Chasm (2000), and Fontanelle (2001)—each a pristine tableau set within a stage-like enclosure—delve into the world of magic realism and fantasy, as opposed to cultural references, politics, and/or actual experience. The focus of Fontanelle is a baby’s head, which appears to float within a fishbowl-like womb. The title refers to a space between the bones of an infant’s skull, where ossification is not yet complete—the so-called “soft spot.” Although much of Kranitzky and Overstreet’s jewelry is upbeat, Fontanelle has an eerie, nightmarish quality to it, reminiscent of memento mori.

Bruce Metcalf, Keith Lewis, and Joyce J. Scott explore darker narratives than either the Pacific Northwest jewelers or Kranitzky and Overstreet. Metcalf’s heady, often autobiographical jewelry chronicles both the joyful and angst-ridden challenges common to humans. Always contemplative, and sometimes sad, his multi-faceted, densely packed object/brooches nonetheless offer hope. Visionary (1995), an homage to American artist Jess Collins, consists of a brooch configured as a fetus-like male (a frequent motif of Metcalf’s) in the guise of an artist sitting before an easel upon which a painting of a solitary eye, almost as large as his entire head, is balanced. The detachable figure and easel inhabit a room-like structure. There are two drawings on the room’s inner surface, one of a pine cone, the other of a monk, which are both seen hanging on the wall of Collins’s studio in a 1983 picture. The figure represents Collins, with the eye image taken from his painting Looking Past Seeing Through: Translation #19, from 1975. Enclosed in this prison-like cell—a cenobite secreted within the cloister of his own imagination—he gazes at the eye as it stares back at him.¹³ Although the “studio” space in Metcalf’s tableau is somewhat claustrophobic, a tiny barred window at the top of its far wall admits some light, indicating his perpetual trust in positive outcomes.

Metcalf’s narrative symbolism, along with his world view, drew aspiring jeweler and AIDS activist Keith Lewis to Kent State University, Ohio, in 1990, where Metcalf was teaching at the time. In fact, Lewis’s formative work shows Metcalf’s influence in the cartoon-like way he depicted the shape of the male body. Lewis ultimately turned to the naturalism of classical Greek and Roman statues for models, of which the brooch Sebastien (Imaginary Self-Portrait) (1999) is a prime example. In keeping with Metcalf’s struggle between unease and optimism, Lewis’s Sebastien is a double-edged celebration of gay sexuality, as here the martyred saint seems sanguine rather than suffering, as he holds a golden arrow (symbolizing penetration) as if it were a royal offering. Satirically celebrating his love of history, as well as his love of men, Lewis puckishly explains, “All fags have to do a St. Sebastien, given his sexy persistence in Christian art.”¹⁴

Lewis also attacks the hypocrisy surrounding modern sexual mores. Cuculla’s Brooch (2001) is based upon an erotic fresco found at Pompeii. The fun, as well as the irony, of this pin is that, at first glance, it resembles an anodyne example of late-Victorian archeological revival jewelry. However, upon closer inspection you realize that an imminent act of coitus is portrayed in the enamelwork, while the gold frame surrounding it is composed of alternating penises and vulvae that terminate in a phallus from which a stream of semen, fashioned as a pearl chain, flows.

Like Lewis, Joyce J. Scott aims to raise social awareness through art. In her powerful jewelry, sculpture, installations, and performance, she, too, has addressed the AIDS crisis, along with domestic violence, police brutality, racial prejudice and stereotyping, gender bias, and body image. Scott’s necklaces are constructed with the peyote stitch, an Indigenous American beading technique that she learned in the mid-1980s from Muscogee (Creek) artist Sandy Fife Wilson at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Although consistently addressing horrific incidents, such as lynching and rape, and political issues, like South African apartheid, much of her imagery centers on ancestry, family, and romance. Branches like Water (2004) not only is an excellent example of “lovers entwined,” a theme Scott returns to frequently, but, like the majority of her practice—whether freestanding sculpture or jewelry—it also indicates her commitment to elevating the status of women’s work, of which beading is an integral part. Scott is descended from a long line of quilters, and, in fact, it was her mother, Elizabeth Talford Scott, who taught her to sew. The beaded and sewn male and female figures in Branches like Water are fashioned in the round, giving the necklace a three-dimensional quality related to her sculpture.

Although she does not work in peyote stitch, Lauren Kalman, like Scott, uses beads in some of her multimedia works, which, along with those by Jennifer Trask, Sondra Sherman, and Lisa Gralnick, represent a hybrid of narrative and conceptual strategies. Employing herself as the model, Kalman’s photograph But if the Crime Is Beautiful … Hood 6 (2014) rails against Austrian architect Adolf Loos’s 1908 treatise, “Ornament and Crime,” in which he denigrates decorative embellishment, demanding, instead, unadorned simplicity for modern design. The photograph is part of Kalman’s series But if the Crime Is Beautiful, a multimedia project consisting of approximately 70 photographs, wearable objects, sculptures, and installations which questions the traditional art historical chronicle that grants privilege to a “utopic and myopic masculinist Eurocentric narrative.”¹⁵ The beaded hoods accompany those made from fabric, as well as fold-forming and cold-connected brass halos, and 3,000 photochemically etched brass leaves pressed manually on a hydraulic press over a 3D-printed die. Kalman’s hoods can also be read as masks, with the series evoking multiple references from executioners’ hoods to gimp masks.¹⁶ Although both hoods and masks connote power, and sometimes oppression, But if the Crime Is Beautiful is comprised of 11,000 alluring Swarovski pearls, an ironic choice for an object of containment, but then again, if ornament is a crime, Kalman’s punishment is sublime!

Both Jennifer Trask and Sondra Sherman have told stories through the language of flowers, but in divergent ways and with dissimilar intent. Trask engages nature to elevate the cycle of existence, ameliorating death and decay “by transforming … detritus … into ‘living’ art.”¹⁷ She typically uses a combination of organic and inorganic matter, metal, and minerals to create jewels that channel the plants for which they’re named. Asteracea: Posey Brooch (2007) is part of her series Unnatural Histories, in which she “delved into our precarious, at times contentious, relationship with nature,” inverting flora and fauna by fabricating the petals of the aster-like flower from snake vertebrae, which have been mounted in silver and punctuated with moonstones.¹⁸ In this, her first series to use animal bones, Trask—ever sensitive to ecological concerns—was thinking about hybrids and our human habit of tinkering with the genome without regard for the consequence.¹⁹ Bone is the core of her practice. “Used literally to express definitive physical sensation and emotional sentiment, bone is considered the absolute reductive essence of our physical senses.”²⁰ Germinate 2010, from the Embodiment Series, is made almost entirely of deer antlers, cow and ox bones, rodent teeth, and pigeon skulls, carved naturalistically to replicate flowers which appear to grow around the wearer’s neck like a burgeoning vine. Wanting the necklace to feel like an extension of the wearer’s own bones, Trask manipulated the antlers to rest ergonomically against the human clavicle.

Sherman regards botanicals as a metaphor for society’s ills and pills, her jewelry a story of malady and manipulation. Her brooches Corsage: Lavandula Lavender (2007, named after an herb used in teas and aromatherapy as a calming agent) and Study: Rhodiola Rosea (2007, a plant available in capsule form to treat anxiety, fatigue, and depression) are from the series Anthophobia: Fear of Flowers (named after a real psychological condition). The latter brooch is a preliminary study piece. Although reminiscent of traditional corsages, these brooches allude to botanical psycho-pharmaceuticals, that is, plants used to treat social anxiety and depression. Although innocent looking, the corsages contain contradictory meanings that reference socially induced psychopathy, along with the disquieting advertisements for medicinal interventions touted by drug companies. “I hate pharmaceutical commercials,” states Sherman. “They make me nervous and then sell me something to ease my nerves.”²¹ Nonetheless confident in the power of flowers to heal, she posits, “Fear of flowers? Who is afraid of a flower? I like the idea of a medicinal corsage … jewelry that soothes.”²²

In a project titled The Gold Standard, Lisa Gralnick attached golden appendages, such as bits of a sink faucet, sections of footwear, portions of wireless telephones, and body parts, onto plaster casts to conduct “an inquiry into the value systems through which contemporary society negotiates progress, accumulates knowledge, and promotes physical comfort through consumerism.”²³ Exploring the history and lore behind gold and its function as a commodity in the marketplace, Gralnick calculated the ratio of gold to plaster based upon the market price of the object that the plaster replicated, and the value of the gold needed to represent that object on a given day.

Gralnick made a plaster cast of her neighbor’s face—from which a golden nose protrudes—to create The Gold Standard Part 1: #8 Rhinoplasty (2005). Because Beech wanted to wear the nose as a piece of jewelry, she altered the work’s narrative in ways both she and Gralnick may not have anticipated, propelling the proboscis into the functional realm by requesting that it be fitted with a detachable gold chain for use as a pendant. Disengaging the gold portion from the plaster cast raises several questions: How does the narrative change when the nose is removed from its support? Does the plaster object lose its narrative affiliation without the gold appendage? Is it now an autonomous sculpture? A naked armature? Only a prop? And, most significantly, what role does the wearer play in donning a replica of another person’s body part? When Beech actually met the model for The Gold Standard Part 1: #8 Rhinoplasty at a SOFA fair some years later, Gralnick asked Beech if she recognized her; indeed she did.²⁴ The nose knows!
 
There is a sensitivity, irony, and, sometimes, even humor to narrative jewelry that isn’t found in work systematizing form, structure, materials, and process alone. Karl Fritsch, best known for satirizing jewelry’s tradition-bound standards by subverting them using their own formats and techniques, adopts a narrative approach for his Double Pukana (2024) ring. The wide-open eyes and protruding tongue of the pukana facial gesture performed by Māori men as part of kapa haka (performing arts) in New Zealand is a mark of the performer’s excitement as well as providing emphasis to the meaning of the song or chant. Is Fritsch using the pukana to offer another challenge to jewelry?

Narrative jewelry has the power to instruct and ignite, to touch our emotions along with our intellect. Narrative jewelry provides a platform for conversation, connection, and empathy. Its messages can be combative, but they can also calm. Narrative jewelry entails interaction between the maker, object, wearer, and viewer, uniting humans more closely than any other type of jewelry by nature of its communicative purpose. Among the salient features of narrative jewelry is an ability to be both autobiographical and biographical, reflecting the maker’s experience, the wearer’s affinity with that experience, and the viewer’s complicity. Narrative jewelry can also tap into the collective unconscious, sparking common memories and universal sentiments.

The fact that Susan Beech’s collection is dense with narrative works may indicate nothing more than personal preference, but then again, they present a compelling argument for its relevance to the field in both the United States and abroad during the last quarter of the twentieth century up to the present. Narrative jewelry is challenging to wear, because attention is focused not only on the object but also on the individual bringing its story into a public arena. The characteristics that make narrative jewelry engrossing can also lead to misunderstanding and a consequent need for explanation. This is true of conceptual jewelry also, but narrative jewelry commands a more intimate interaction. Some collectors don’t welcome such attention and are reluctant to engage in the discourse that may ensue. Not Susan Beech! The sheer number of such works in her collection demonstrates both the richness of narrative jewelry and, considering its current proliferation, the foresight of Beech herself.

Today narrative jewelry is a benchmark of the discipline. Inspired by classic fables and modern comics, German maker Alexander Blank invents protagonists to relate narratives that channel his personal thoughts. To speak of the female archetype and women’s conflicting roles in contemporary society, Hungarian jeweler Veronika Fabian employs tattoo imagery to decorate necklaces comprised of multiple nested chains. Dutch maker Felieke van der Leest uses textile techniques, such as knitting and crochet, to fashion necklaces and brooches featuring hilarious fantasy animals that often find themselves in weird situations—much like humans. And the list goes on.

It took time, but narrative jewelry is in the ascendant. It’s ironic that some of the American jewelers I interviewed for this essay denied being “narrative.” Maybe this is due to an amorphous definition and/or the pejoratives formerly associated with the term, or perhaps there remains a lingering notion that literal is somehow less than equivocal. Putting semantics aside, let us value jewelry that not only makes us think but also makes us feel.
 


Notes:
 
1 Peter Dormer and Ralph Turner, The New Jewelry: Trends and Traditions (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 119, 116.    
2 Liesbeth den Besten, email to Toni Greenbaum, July 19, 2024. The author wishes to thank den Besten for her invaluable help in sourcing pertinent literature.    
3 Jack Cunningham, “Contemporary European Narrative Jewellery” (practice-based PhD,
The Glasgow School of Art, Department of Silversmithing and Jewellery, July 2007), 25. This thesis includes a comprehensive bibliography on various theories of narratology.
4 Bruce Metcalf, email to Toni Greenbaum, June 18, 2024.
5 Damian Skinner, email to Toni Greenbaum, June 10, 2024.
6 Yvònne G.J.M. Joris, “Apology,” in Beauty Is a Story (’s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands: Museum Het Kruithuis, 1991), 8.
7 Gert Staal, “Beauty Is a Story,” in Beauty Is a Story, 21.
8 Yvònne G. J. M.  Joris, “Foreword,” in American Dreams, American Extremes (’s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands: Museum Het Kruithuis, 1990), n. p.
9 De Stijl was a Dutch art movement, founded in 1917, that advocated pure abstraction, reducing objects to the essentials of form and using only black, white, and primary colors.
10 Joris, “Foreword,” n.p.
11 Laurie Hall, email to Toni Greenbaum, April 3, 2024.
12 Ibid.
13 Bruce Metcalf, email to Toni Greenbaum, March 31, 2024.
14 Keith Lewis in Damian Skinner and Keith Lewis, Dead Souls: Desire and Memory in the Jewelry of Keith Lewis (Stuttgart: arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2023), 31.
15 Lauren Kalman, But if the Crime Is Beautiful   … Hoods (2014–2016), accessed July 30, 2024, www.laurenkalman.com/portfolio/hoods.
16  Ibid.
17 David McFadden, quoted in Toni Greenbaum, “The Transformative Art of Jennifer Trask,” Metalsmith 34, no. 5 (2014): 31.
18 Jennifer Trask, “Unnatural Histories: Flourish” (undated and unpublished manuscript, collection of the artist, n.p.).
19 Jennifer Trask, email to Toni Greenbaum, April 30, 2024.
20 Ibid.
21 Sondra Sherman, email to Toni Greenbaum, April 10, 2024.
22  Ibid.
23  Lisa Gralnick, quoted in Kiff Slemmons, “More Than One to Make One,” Art Jewelry Forum (website), March 23, 2014, accessed July 30, 2024, www.artjewelryforum.org/articles/more-than-one-to-make-one/.
24 Susan Beech, email to Toni Greenbaum, May 22, 2024.
 

About the author

Toni Greenbaum (a.k.a. Toni Lesser Wolf) is a New York-based art historian specializing in twentieth and twenty-first century jewelry and metalwork. She wrote Messengers of Modernism: American Studio Jewelry 1940-1960, Sam Kramer: Jeweler on the Edge, the entries on jewelry and metalwork for Design 1935-1965: What Modern Was, and co-wrote the chapter on jewelry for Women Designers in the U.S.A. 1900-2000: Diversity and Difference, along with numerous book chapters, exhibition catalogues, and essays for arts publications. She is currently working on a monograph about modernist jeweler Art Smith, to be published by Smithsonian Books in fall 2026.

Greenbaum has lectured internationally at institutions such as the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Savannah. She has worked on exhibitions for many museums, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; and Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York. Greenbaum is on the Board of Directors of Art Jewelry Forum and a member of its Editorial Advisory Committee.


Toni Greenbaum at Instagram

Photo by David Bielander.