Society for Contemporary Craft Gallery

Upcoming Exhibition

Transformation 4: Contemporary Works in Ceramics
Elizabeth R. Raphael Founder's Prize Exhibition

November 14, 2003 - February 28, 2004

2003 Finalists Announced

November 17, 2001 … The Society for Contemporary Craft (SCC) announced the winner of this year’s Elizabeth R. Raphael Founder’s Prize at the November 16th opening of the third biennial prize exhibition. Jewelry artist Suzan Rezac of Oak Park, IL, was awarded this prestigious prize for her necklace, Opus Tessellatum. Her award-winning piece can be seen, along with the work of the second prize winner and 34 finalists, in Transformation 3: Contemporary Works in Jewelry and Small Metals, the Elizabeth R. Raphael Founder’s Prize exhibition, which runs through March 23, 2002 at the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh.

Rezac’s winning entry is an exquisitely detailed necklace created using multiple metals in the “marriage of metals” technique, along with ancient Japanese coloring techniques. Marriage of metals is a technique in which various metals are skillfully fitted together like a puzzle, somewhat like marquetry. According to Raphael Prize juror Bruce Metcalf, “This piece is beautifully made and has a strong connection to history. Suzan borrows historical decorative motifs from jewelry, pottery, and even architecture—but mixes them with invented patterns in a fresh way.” The piece was selected for its beauty, craftsmanship, originality, and wearability, the blending of which Metcalf calls, “a notable accomplishment.”

The Founder’s Prize carries a $5,000 cash award, purchase of the winning piece for SCC’s permanent collection, an artist’s video, a “mini solo exhibition” within the larger exhibition, and inclusion in the exhibition catalogue.

A native of Vrchlabi, Czech Republic, Rezac holds both a BFA and MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her works have been featured in exhibitions and publications in Europe, Japan, Canada, and the United States, and are in the private collections of Ronald Abramson (Washington, DC); Helen Drutt (Philadelphia, PA); Karen Johnson Boyd (Racine, WI); and Inge Asenbaum (Vienna, Austria).

Second Prize was awarded to Maria Phillips for her neckpiece, Moment, which utilizes an eclectic mix of metal, glass, and natural material, such as sheep gut cast in steel wire. Phillips has exhibited her work in galleries throughout the U.S., and holds a MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle. She lives in Seattle, WA. “Maria’s piece is one of the most original in the competition,” says Metcalf. “It is fresh, interesting, and engaging.” In addition to her winning piece, Phillips has several other works on display in the Transformation exhibition, and was awarded a cash prize.

The Elizabeth R. Raphael Founder’s Prize, awarded biennially in conjunction with a juried exhibition, corresponding catalogue, and video about the winning artist, is funded by the daughters of Elizabeth R. Raphael, who founded the Society for Contemporary Craft, and was a nationally known figure on the contemporary art scene for several decades. This year’s jurors included David McFadden, Chief Curator, American Craft Museum, New York; Bruce Metcalf, metalsmith and art critic, Philadelphia; Janet McCall, SCC Executive Director; and Alexandra, Catherine, and Margaret Raphael—Elizabeth Raphael’s daughters.

A catalogue designed by Scott Pipitone Design of Pittsburgh, features photo documentation and biographical information on each of the finalists, as well as an essay by Bruce Metcalf, and is available at the Society for $12. A 12-minute video on the winning artist, produced by Alan I. Harris Group, also accompanied the exhibition. The video is available for viewing at the Society and may be purchased from SCC.

Elizabeth R. Raphael Prize Finalists

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 1, 2001 . . . The Society for Contemporary Craft has announced 36 finalists for Elizabeth R. Raphael Founder's Prize, a $5,000 cash award for excellence in the field of contemporary crafts. The biennial award, given in conjunction with a juried exhibition at SCC, a corresponding catalogue, and a feature video on the winning artist will be given on Friday, November 16, to an artist working in jewelry/small metals, for a piece that has been created within the past twelve months and deals with the theme “transformation.” The prize is funded by the daughters of Elizabeth R. Raphael, the founder of the organization and a nationally known figure in the contemporary art scene for several decades.

A total of 167 entries were received from artists in the United States, Canada and Australia. This year's jury includes David Revere McFadden, chief curator, American Craft Museum, New York; Bruce Metcalf, metalsmith and art critic, Philadelphia and Janet McCall, Executive Director, SCC; as well as Elizabeth Raphael's three daughters, Alexandra Raphael, Catherine Raphael, and Margaret Raphael has selected 36 finalists from 16 states. Each of the artists have been invited to submit a work for final jurying in early October, and their work will be included in the exhibition Transformation: Contemporary Works in Jewelry and Small Metals (November 16, 2001—March 23, 2002).

“In selecting finalists, we look for innovation and pushing the envelope, in terms of techniques being used by artists working in metal. In particular, we want pieces that will challenge our viewers and move them beyond their own frame of reference when considering approaches to this medium. We are also concerned with presenting examples of high quality execution that would help raise standards of excellence in the field,” said Janet McCall, Executive Director of SCC.

FINALISTS:
	Talya Baharal	Rifton, NY
	Harriete Estel Berman	San Mateo, CA
	Catherine Butler	Cleveland Heights, OH
	Harlan Butt	Denton, TX
	Sofia Calderwood	Kent, OH
	David Damkoehler	New Franken, WI
	Sandra Enterline	San Francisco, CA
	Darlys Ewoldt	Chicago, IL
	Diane Falkenhagen	Anchorage, AK
	Paz Fernandez	Philadelphia, PA
	David Freda	San Clemente, CA
	Susie Ganch	Penland, NC
	Geoffrey Giles	Candler, NC
	Gabrielle Gould	St. Augustive, FL
	Anne Hallam	San Diego, CA
	Nicole Jacquard	Bloomington, IN
	Hai-Chi Jihn	Whitefish Bay, WI
	Robin J. Kraft	Lafayette, IN
	Mariko Kusumoto	San Francisco, CA
	Tom Muir	Perrysburg, OH
	Susan Myers	Seattle, WA
	Dennis Nahabetian	Grand Forks, ND
	Patricia Nelson	Muncie, IN
	Emiko Oye	San Francisco, CA
	Maria Phillips	Kent, OH
	Mary Preston	Rhinecliff, NY
	Louise Rauh	Iowa City, IA
	Suzan Rezac	Oak Park, IL
	Phillip Rizzi	Seattle , WA
	Anika Smulovitz	Madison, WI
	Lin Stanionis	Lansing, KS
	Tracy Steepy	Pomona, CA
	Julia Turner	San Francisco, CA
	Johan Van Aswegen	Providence, RI
	Kiwon Wang	New York, NY
	Lynn Elizabeth Whitford	Madison, WI

Click here for photos of all entries

Catalogue Essay by Juror Bruce Metcalf

When I first started in my craft, I thought of myself as a young rebel. I used to think that shock value and dramatic gestures were sufficient. Well, that was then, and this is now. These days I look for complexity, ambiguity, and resonance. I also find that I look for a sense of history. In fact, I can’t escape it. I must be getting old.

Given my taste for historical comparisons, it’s always interesting to serve on a jury for a national exhibit like the Raphael Prize. The entries come from all over the country, and from craftspeople both young and old. From the juror’s seat, it becomes possible to perceive broad changes in the field: trend spotting, if you will. The field is not like it was when I began in 1970, and it’s almost unrecognizable when compared to its beginning immediately after the Second World War. So, in this essay, I would like to remark on the recent features in the ongoing evolution of jewelry and metalsmithing.

The most pervasive trend in contemporary jewelry and metalsmithing is eclecticism. This is the business of borrowing historical styles and details. Young artists regard history as a vast dictionary that can be opened to any page and copied from at will. Nothing is out-of-bounds. Everything can be recycled freely, often with a cheerful disregard for old categories and boundaries. It’s mix n’ match design. But because this approach can be so easily abused, some critics despise it passionately. Used without intelligence, eclecticism produces dumb, scruffy mongrels by the thousands. Careless designers glue motifs from virtually any historical period onto functional objects, or jumble unrelated bits and pieces together to make bad sculpture. Yucko! Luckily, I don’t believe the jury selected any for this exhibit.

But critics who would dismiss all eclecticism outright are missing the point. Treating history as an open reference book allows designers to orchestrate an enormous range of meanings. For example, a jeweler who refers to Victorian sentimental jewelry can point to the role jewelry once had as a carrier of diverse meaning and feeling, while simultaneously noting the loss of a language for communicating nuanced feeling in our own society. This is precisely what a jeweler like Mary Preston does. In fact, she submitted a piece called Mourning Brooch #4, with a clear reference to Victorian sentimental jewelry. Here was eclecticism done with intelligence and subtlety.

Unlike the first modern craftsmen and women who embraced decoration - in the Arts and Crafts Movement more than a century ago - the new generation rarely observes nature directly. There’s little evidence of painstaking observation, sketching directly from nature, or careful study of botany. Instead, these jewelers present their decoration “in quotations,” with a strong flavor of postmodern ironic distance. Decoration is understood as a language, and decorative elements become semantic, like words in a sentence. This approach to decoration seems to go hand-in-glove with the eclecticism I just mentioned.

Much of the new decoration is highly stylized, and some of it is wonderfully weird. Here is mutant nature, recombinant nature: plants and flowers filtered through surrealism for poetic effect. One of the best jewelers of this type is Maria Phillips, who makes some of the strangest things I have ever seen.

There’s another kind of decoration that is inflected with kitsch and pop culture. Here, nature is regarded as distant and completely mediated, as if the artist was watching it on TV; probably on a cartoon network. The emphasis is on artificiality and slick phoniness. Not that this is a bad thing, though. At best, this new decoration resembles the gleeful bad taste of Barbie costumes and psychedelic stick-ons, and strikes me as a celebration of energetic American consumer culture.

Along with a revival of eclecticism and decoration, I saw a fair amount of social critique. This work is something of a throwback to the 1980s, when a tidal wave of political correctness washed through academia. This is now the default style of graduate school jewelry making: the easy way to a M.F.A. degree. The work takes a disapproving view of American culture, and is often flavored with dour feminism and before-the-fall-of-the-wall Marxism. Stylistically, it usually takes the form of text and image. There will be a symbol of some questionable cultural activity (choose your cause!), and there will be at least one line of words somewhere on the object, just to make sure we all get the point. The jury gave most of this work the boot. While we respect social critique, we also appreciate a lighter touch. We didn’t like being hectored.

The jury saw a fair amount of relaxed craftsmanship. There were visible tool marks, scuffed-up finishes, and a general roughness of execution. All this might represent a principled opposition to the perfect finishes and good taste of late-modern design, as in the architecture of Mies Van Der Rohe and the silversmithing of countless Georg Jensen wannabees. On the other hand, it could also represent an implicit claim of authenticity, a kind of latter-day primitivism. I suppose it’s like grunge rock. The sloppy musicianship of bands like Nirvana was presumed to represent total honesty. Myself, I think the equation of crudeness with the genuine is baloney - this kind of authenticity can be faked without any effort at all - and the jury rejected much of it. But the attitude occasionally produces compelling results: Sofia Calderwood’s delightful constructions of oddball materials (like earplugs) come to mind.

There was also a trend of conspicuous absence: the jury saw very little functional hollowware. I don’t know why this is so. Perhaps Americans think that functional vessels offer no creative opportunities, or that all the good stuff has already been done. (The ghost of Jensen looms ominously here.) Maybe it’s because most Americans no longer have enough skill to make good metal vessels. Or maybe there’s no money in it. However, there are a number of young British silversmiths doing interesting new work, and I wish they could infect Americans with a renewed sense of possibility.

In the end, I found the jurying process reassuring. We saw a lot of innovative work, and that indicates that jewelry and metalsmithing continue to evolve. I would hate to think that the field is stagnating. The trends I have noted are some of the directions that the field is exploring now, and suggest some of the directions it will go in the future. There will be more quotation, more boundary-crossing, and more neo-primitivism. I also suspect we’ll see much more of the pop/kitsch impulse, and I think that direction will offer wonderful new possibilities as it combines with social critique and the influence of conceptual art. So, I’m optimistic. The craft isn’t dead yet.

©2001 Bruce Metcalf