Editor’s Picks
Smithsonian Craft Show 2024
Patrick R. Benesh-Liu brings readers on a tour of the Smithsonian Craft Show, and delves into the people whose volunteered time makes the show possible. He makes the argument that we cannot take good things for granted, and that by investing our time and presence, we can preserve and grow those good things.
AMY NGUYEN, WEARABLE ART.
Ornament Celebrates
Our 50th Anniversary
Volume 44, No. 4
Table of Contents
Features
Ornament at 50.
Mary Lee Hu.
Working with Wire
Emile Pingat.
Caped Crusader
Everybody’s Bolos.
Quintessentially Western
Smithsonian Craft Show 2024.
Departments
Craft and Education.
Chunghi Choo. Experimentations in Jewelry
Showcase.
Ornament at 50
Themes of Nature.
Bugging Out. A Presentation of Insect Jewelry
ORNAMENT AT 50
Founding Coeditor Robert K. Liu takes us back through fifty years of Ornament Magazine and the Bead Journal, showing through photographs the magnificent journey that he and the late Coeditor Carolyn L.E. Benesh have undertaken, and the incredible people they have met along the way.
Revisited: Mary Lee Hu
We revisit the mesmerizing jewelry of Mary Lee Hu by the late Carolyn L.E. Benesh. Carolyn had a personal appreciation of Hu’s meticulous work, and in this article, she offers a paean to beauty, accomplished and mighty, through Hu’s own journey of teaching and innovating.
SMITHSONIAN CRAFT SHOW 2024
Patrick R. Benesh-Liu brings readers on a tour of the Smithsonian Craft Show, and delves into the people whose volunteered time makes the show possible. He makes the argument that we cannot take good things for granted, and that by investing our time and presence, we can preserve and grow those good things.
Chunghi Choo: Experimentations in Jewelry
Having received the Visionary Award in Metal at the 2023 Smithsonian Craft Show, we explore the jewelry of Chunghi Choo, and its effect on her progression as an artist and educator.
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.
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.
AMY NGUYEN, SHIBORI DYED CLOTHING
KEN LOEBER & DONA LOOK, JEWELRY
BIBA SCHUTZ, JEWELRY
JANICE KISSINGER, HAND-DYED FELTED CLOTHING
K. RILEY, HANDMADE BLOCK-PRINT CLOTHING
JUDITH KINGHORN, JEWELRY
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.
We revisit the mesmerizing jewelry of Mary Lee Hu by the late Carolyn L.E. Benesh. Carolyn had a personal appreciation of Hu’s meticulous work, and in this article, she offers a paean to beauty, accomplished and mighty, through Hu’s own journey of teaching and innovating.