Ring Redux. The Susan Grant Lewin Collection

Over the past fifty years, Susan Grant Lewin -one of the most influential collectors of twentieth and twenty-first-century art jewelry- has collected more than a hundred avant-garde rings by internationally renowned artists and emerging talents. Now for the first time, they are being presented together in the publication RING REDUX, which accompanies the exhibition of the same name at SCAD Museum of Art.

The Susan Grant Lewin Collection encompasses rings from the 1950s to the present day. Whether Arline Fisch, Wendy Ramshaw, Giampaolo Babetto, David Bielander, or Deganit Stern Schocken, it always entails the individual examination of one of the world's most original jewelry forms and its reinterpretation for our time.

The collection brings Lewin's openness to new artistic ideas as much to the fore as it does the diversity of contemporary jewelry, reflecting aesthetic developments in art and design, craftsmanship and technology. The works shown in the book are divided into six groups: rings that are based on strict geometry are juxtaposed with freer forms that expand the limits of the body. Works that play with the theme of darkness are contrasted with those that thematize light and airiness or revel in color. Finally, rings of sensuous, smooth surfaces or sharp edges and perilous spikes that address our sense of touch are seen alongside objects that express the complexity of human relationships-spanning the highly personal to the universal or enabling one to experience grotesque, dream-like phenomena in an intimate format.

The artistry and temerity of the sculptural forms are re-produced in spectacular photographs produced especially for the publication. The images are accompanied by various articles: a foreword by Paula Wallace (president and founder of SCAD), a text by the collector herself, an essay by the eminent jewelry curator Ursula Ilse-Neuman, and an interview with SCAD professor Adam Grinovich. In“Artists' Voices,” compiled by Sarah Davies, the jewelry artists too provide valuable insights into the conception and execution of their works.

The publication is released to mark the eponymous exhibition at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum (Georgia, US), which can be viewed until the end of January 2022.