At New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, OUT of the Jewelry Box brings together 78 works spanning seven decades to explore queer identity, desire, loss, and community through the intimate art of adornment.At New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, OUT of the Jewelry Box brings together 78 works spanning seven decades to explore queer identity, desire, loss, and community through the intimate art of adornment.
Walk through most museum jewelry collections, and you’re largely looking at fashion history through a female lens. “Jewelry is donated by women, for the most part, so what we see in museums is the taste of women,” says Barbara Paris Gifford, senior curator of jewelry at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design. “Which is great, because that’s rarely the case!”
But with OUT of the Jewelry Box, on view through October 4, Gifford spotlighted queer perspectives that define boundary-pushing adornment. Through 78 pieces, the exhibition uses jewelry as an intimate vehicle for storytelling, as physical and metaphorical extensions of the human body and queer identity. “The exhibit is important because it takes a close, focused look at queer voices through the medium of jewelry,” Gifford says.
At the heart of the exhibition are the voices and donations of Ron Porter and Joe Price, prolific collectors whose love affair with art jewelry began, fatefully, on a 1986 trip to MAD, then known as the American Craft Museum. Inspired by the unconventional materials and craftsmanship of studio jewelry, the couple fell in love with art jewelry as collectible material culture. Decades later, they gifted a significant group of works to the institution. Gifford worked with them to select 56 pieces that honor their taste and voice, but their perspective is only one part of the story. “They represent a certain experience within the gay male community—but that’s not the only kind of queer experience,” Gifford says, noting that she coupled their collection with 22 pieces from the museum’s preexisting collection and beyond to paint a broader portrait of queer adornment.
The jewelry stretches from Art Smith’s sinuous brass neckpieces of the 1950s to works made in 2023, grouped around themes including Affirmation of Queer Desire, Contemporary Events and Issues, Imaginary Worlds, and Wondrous Forms, alongside focused sections devoted to artists Bob Ebendorf and Keith Lewis.
Among works by emerging jewelers and allies, the assortment features pivotal avant-garde names with a lasting influence on jewelry history who were closeted at the time. David Webb’s 18-karat gold, ruby and diamond-adorned Monkey Brooch (1972), for example, showcases the humor and exuberance that made Webb a favorite amongst Elizabeth Taylor and Diana Vreeland. “Webb was their close friend but never publicly came out,” Gifford recalls. “So we wanted to honor his legacy in the context of celebrating queerness today.”
Even more personal is Lewis’s Randy Johnson, which tells the story of his close friend who died of AIDS. Near the end of his life, he wanted to see Lewis, but Lewis never made it to him. In the piece, a figure representing Lewis holds his friend’s skeleton, commemorating Johnson’s life while grappling with the guilt of not seeing him before he died.
At a time when LGBTQ+ rights are increasingly threatened, Gifford sees jewelry as a means for representing their voices. “The more we are able to represent their voices and see their vision, the more allies are created,” she says. “At the end of the day, this exhibit is an exhibit of empathy. It’s about telling stories about and representing all kinds of people through jewelry.”
