Ornament Print Edition Volume 43.4

Welcome to our latest edition of Ornament Magazine! Ashley Callahan describes how Stacy Lee Webber has transformed American coins, like the copper penny, into sculpture and jewelry with her energetic piercing skills. Her artistic reach has now extended to embroidered dollar bills. In all cases, the time and effort she imbues into each piece raises their intrinisic worth.

Leslie Clark delves into the role polymer artist Kathleen Dustin, as well as Australian artist and activist Wendy Moore, and Nepali lawyer Kopila Basnet have played in establishing and supporting the Nepali organization Samunnat, which helps abused women to earn a living through education and self-empowerment.

Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell explores the career of the famous French couturier through the lens of “Madame Grès: The Art of Draping,” an exhibition at SCAD FASH. Madame Grès elegantly draped her clients in a neoclassic style, working like a sculptor in building the dress upon the body.

Robert K. Liu discusses the use of the vibrant and ritually important spondylus shell as jewelry in the precolumbian Americas, among Native Americans of the American Southwest and by contemporary jewelers.

Patrick R. Benesh-Liu reminisces on this year’s Smithsonian Craft Show, which made a triumphant return in-person in 2022. His thoughts linger on the commonality of craft, made by hand, and how public marketplaces like the Smithsonian are vital to the rich human experience of connection and conversation.