Interview with Elsie Michie, the collector behind the Adore

Jewelry That Makes You Think.

INTERVIEW

ELSIE MICHIE

The Story of a Collector and Her Art Jewelry

by Barbara Minor and Christopher Hentz

In Adore | Adorn, the Louisiana State University Museum of Art is exhibiting 100 works of contemporary art jewelry from the collection of LSU College of Humanities and Social Sciences Associate Dean Dr. Elsie Michie. The exhibited works are made by artists working in the medium of jewelry. All works have a strong appeal as objects to be examined closely and handled, while also being functional and wearable. One of the exhibition plaques states that “Collector Elsie Mitchie values experimental and innovative designs over precious materials.” This is the first exhibition of Dr. Michie’s collection.

SPOTLIGHT ON

BARBARA PARIS GIFFORD

Juror for the 2020 Young Artist Award

Barbara Paris Gifford is an assistant curator at NYC’s Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), where she has served as part of the curatorial team for exhibitions in a number of craft media, including Fake News and True Love, which featured jewelry by Robert Baines, Lauren Kalman: But if the Crime Is Beautiful…, and La Frontera: Encounters Along the Border, in which jewelry artists from Mexico, the US, Latin America, and Europe explored the underlying currents of the border environment within geographic, political, economic, social, cultural, and ideological contexts.

Gifford is curating the upcoming MAD exhibition 45 Stories in Jewelry; recently was a guest speaker at Zimmerhof 2019; and has written for many publications, including Metalsmith , Modern Magazine, The Journal of Modern Craft, and American Society of Jewelry Historians Newsletter. She’ll soon make time in her busy schedule to serve on the three-member jury for the 2020 AJF Young Artist Award. Applications for the $7,500 prize are open to jewelry artists through January 12, 2020. Find the guidelines here .

The 2020 AJF Young Artist Award Guidelines are now available.

Applications will be accepted through January 12, 2020.

Get your applications ready!

FEATURED AJF LIBRARY CONTENT

This gallery guide supports the exhibition Go For Baroque: Opulence and Excess in Contemporary Art, on view at the Racine Art Museum from May 22-September 4, 2016. It explores how theoretical concepts of opulence and excess are explored in contemporary art, especially jewelry. Focusing on artists from the United States and Western Europe, it offers a Western-based interdisciplinary perspective for thinking about what "baroque" could mean in a modern context. Jewelry forms the basis of this conversation for its historical connection to visual and material articulations of excess and ornament. While the historical emphasis on baroque in art involved spectacle on an elaborate scale, a contemporary baroque—such as what is suggested with this exhibition—could be identified by its response to excess and lavishness, the decorative or the ornamental, and the theatrical.

View the PDF.

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