The SNAG crowd migrated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for a special night where we had the pleasure to attend the Jewelry in Motion 2009 (show curated by Gail Brown) in combination with the wonderful Cezanne and beyond exhibition. The first was a delightful catwalk performance of worn pieces of jewelry by 34 artists.
It was rare opportunity to see the pieces displayed on the body, some of the pieces were worn by the artists and all the models performance was absolutely fantastic! For the complete list of artists and their links see here.
The second is an exhibition that features Cézanne work, displayed alongside works by several artists for whom Cézanne has been a central inspiration and whose work reflects, both visually and poetically, Cézanne’s extraordinary legacy.
I must say, I really enjoyed the evening and the Jewelry in Motion show, but some of the criticisms I've heard was that the show did not have enough metal work per se, instead fiber was the main protagonist of the evening. I personally love the cross contamination of fields, but I can see the point of these voices. Any comment on this topic is more than welcome!
Doug Bucci officially opened the conference introducing the theme of the conference: REVOLUTION. As also reported on his blog “Revolution can be defined in many ways: a sudden change; a movement against a current situation; the actions of individuals or groups of individuals "revolutionaries." On SNAG's 40th anniversary, this conference will provide the critical context to consider the future of our profession, provide us the opportunity to reflect upon our history, and ultimately celebrate the independent thinkers and decisive movements that ensure change, growth and evolution in our discipline”.
I know I should probably write an objective summary of the conference and leave my personal opinion for the final comments...but I won’t! I can't help saying something on this first! I think the conference gave a lot of attention to the past revolutionary but missed the opportunity of discussing the future! Let me explain a bit more what I mean, I personally am a fond of history and I truly believe that knowing the past is the key to a complete understanding and appreciation of present and future, BUT the conference was all about the history (exception made for few brilliant talks). I would have loved to see all the talks exploring more the future aspect of jewelry, of craft and of the artist profession. I would have loved listening to how the big minds who took the stage are foreseeing the future. I feel we have missed a good opportunity to discuss revolutions going on now. Some examples?
3D modeling and CAD/CAM
new metals
alternative materials
interdisciplinary
I’ll discuss these themes a bit more in details later, now let’s get back to the first day of REVOLUTION!
Stanley Lechtzin was first awarded with SNAG Lifetime Achievement Award and he was also the first speaker with a talk titled “Seizing the Opportunity”.
He presented a collection of original old video/audio of revolutionary artists and teacher of the past. My take home message from him is all in title of his talk, recognize and seize the opportunities when they come up!
Second speaker of the day was Dr. Sandra Alfoldy, her presentation was titled “Imagining Ourselves: Looking into the Future of Craft”.
I didn’t really hear any future direction of the craft in her talk, but for a more in depth description/analysis of her talk I have to link to Gabriel Craig’s blog post. Gabriel is definitively very passionate about this topic and you can follow the on-going discussion on crafthaus started by him.
The spot lights in the afternoon were for Leo Caballero, the co-founder of Klimt02 and his talk titled “Global Networking in a Global Community”.
Leo’s talked about the creation of K02 as an answer to the need of a reference space for contemporary jewellery artists and galleries. His presentation was divided into 5 sections:
Why not? Or how K02 was born
Creation, art selection, quality
Principles and objectives
The net, new technologies and K02
What about the future
At the end a video was played with a sequence of artists’ images/videos alternated by inspiring quotes. Leo suggestion for the future was: “interaction is the key for the future”.
The afternoon section was concluded by the Juried Student Presentation, that you can see in the presentation below
