Editor’s Picks

 

 

PMA CRAFT SHOW 2025

The Philadelphia Musuem of Art Contemporary Craft Show brings together some of the best artists in American craft, right as Handwork 2026 kicks off in the City of Brotherly Love. It takes place November 7 – 9, with a Preview Gala on November 6. You can visit the show and purchase work from the 195 exhibiting artists; to learn more, visit www.pmacraftshow.org.

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Kate Rothra Fleming | JEWELRY

 

Volume 46, No. 2

Table of Contents

 

 
 

Features

Golden and Beloved
Linda Kindler Priest’s Endangered Animals

Fashioning Indigenous Futures
San Pedro Quiatoni Beads
A Fifty Year Old Unsolved Mystery
Gathering the Rainbow
103rd Santa Fe Indian Market

Departments

Celebration of Humanity.
Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026
Craft Marketplace.
2025 PMA Contemporary Craft Show
Vervet Noir Showcase.
Talismans of History.
Ellen Windemuth’s Cultural Fusion
Sexy Hearts, Messy Hair

 
 

GOLDEN AND BELOVED

Ashley Callahan visits the jeweled menagerie of Linda Kindler Priest, who couples delicately chased and repousséd gold and silver creatures with specifically chosen semiprecious stones. These beautiful portraits of the animal kingdom are also clarion calls to save our planet.


“FUTURE IMAGINARIES”

Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell takes us through “Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology” at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, California, where Native futurism uses fashion and traditional craft to envision a better tomorrow for Native Americans.


PMA CONTEMPORARY CRAFT SHOW 2025

The Philadelphia Musuem of Art Contemporary Craft Show brings together some of the best artists in American craft, right as Handwork 2026 kicks off in the City of Brotherly Love.


 

The Process of Becoming

We Share with You the Jewelry Collection of the late Ornament Coeditor, Carolyn L.E. Benesh, who forged strong and intimate bonds with many of the artists whose work she purchased.

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Articles, Past and Present

 

The Expression of the Handmade Makes Itself Felt through Genuineness.
What was Made Took a Combination of Skill and Ingenuity, Birthed From That Mysterious Dark Place of Imagination.


Wearable Art

It came about as a nexus in the 60s and 70s, referencing a freeform fusion of heretofore two-dimensional art and applying it to the canvas of the human being. These clothes as costume and costume as clothes birthed off a movement that still has its adherents even now, in the contemporary age.

Jewelry has had to find itself in the Modernist age, transcending the fine jewelry of wealth at the turn of the century, and reaching mid-century the abstracted explorations of material, composition, and storytelling that would yield to the contemporary art jewelry movement. Today, contemporary art jewelry remains a creatively vibrant field, a cross-disciplinary cooperation that branches off into academic work and that sold at craft shows.

We bring you the broad spectrum of human self-expression in wearable art, from the ancient and the ethnic, to the contemporary. Both here in the United States, and abroad.

Here are a few of the jewelers and clothing makers in the wearable art community for your enjoyment. We will continue to rotate this selection each month, so you will always find superlative new work to explore.


 

Intelligent Reading.

Enter a world where experience and skill cooperate with imagination and materials to create astounding objects. The spectrum of human adornment extends from tribal and folk cultures around the globe, to the rarefied heights of the fashion industry, to contemporary art jewelry and craft which seeks to explore new boundaries.

 

 

SHOP EASILY.

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