Overview
Join Christie’s and Bella Neyman on 5 weeks of jewelry adventures around New York City. Familiarize yourself with some of the most beautiful and unusual jewels crafted over the last two centuries by seeing them in-person. This course is an incredible opportunity to experience jewelry history firsthand in important public and private collections, as well as see some of the most incredible designers in their private salons. Each visit will explore a particular period as told by museum curators, gallerists, dealers, collectors, and jewelers. Why rely on images when some of the world's best jewels can come to life in front of your very eyes?
Visits TBA.
Previous Visits Have Included:
- Exclusive tour of Sabyasachi NYC
- Speaking with jewelry artist Yuka Saito
- A fabulous pearl education with Assael
- Learning about and handling the best 20th Century jewelry with the Macklowe Gallery
- Looking at Victorian and Georgian Jewelry with Dana Kiyomura of Keyamour
Academic Profile
Bella Neyman is the co-founder of New York City Jewelry Week, a city-wide celebration of jewelry held annually in November. She is also an independent curator and writer specializing in contemporary art jewelry. She has organized multiple exhibitions in the United States and Europe including most recently, 45 Stories in Jewelry at the Museum of Arts and Design. Bella’s articles on decorative arts, fashion and jewelry have appeared in the New York Times, Metalsmith, American Craft and The Magazine Antiques amongst others. From 2014-2018, she was the director of the Gallery at Reinstein|Ross, a New York-based gallery specializing in contemporary jewelry. Bella has been on the Board of the Art Jewelry Forum since 2013. She lives with her husband and daughter in Brooklyn, NY.
Image: Citrine Peridot and Diamond Necklace and Bracelet Flower Suite, ca. 1940s Courtesy of Macklowe Gallery.
Schedule
September 22, 2023: The Enchanting World of Larkspur & Hawk
Larkspur & Hawk is a modern fine jewelry brand inspired by the past that was founded by Emily Satloff in 2000. A lifelong scholar of art and design, Emily’s graduate studies in the history of decorative arts at both Sotheby’s and the Cooper-Hewitt led her to museum curatorial work. She then began dealing antique jewelry with a specialty in the 18th century and developed a cult following. It was a burning curiosity that led her to develop her modern designs with a focus on reviving craftsmanship and techniques from the Georgian era in a way that no other jewelers do today. Specifically, antique inspired silhouettes featuring the lost art of foiling gemstones to give them more vibrancy and color that have become a signature hallmark of the brand. A career highlight for Emily happened this year when she was contacted by the Emmy-Award winning costume designer, Lyn Paolo, for the Netflix series “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.” More than 60 pieces of Larkspur & Hawk jewelry were featured throughout the six episodes.
September 29, 2023: Traveling Back in Time: A Visit to Gray & Davis
The West Village shop of Gray & Davis is comprised of classic and unique pieces that date from the 18th century through the 1930s. Every vintage jewel that enters their cases is carefully studied, and vetted for authenticity of age and materials. Gray & Davis jewelry cases are a treasure trove of Victorian snake rings, 19th c. cameos, crescent brooches, retro gold bracelets, and Edwardian and Deco diamond rings. Today the company is also known for their beautiful custom pieces that are sketched in-house to their client’s specifications and executed by master craftsmen right in NYC. Gray & Davis was founded in 1999 by Gray Boone, a petite southern woman with a whole lot of brass.
October 6, 2023: Tour of the exhibition, “Enchanting Imagination: The Objets d’Art of André Chervin and Carvin French Jewelers”
Enchanting Imagination: The Objets d’Art of André Chervin and Carvin French Jewelers is a dazzling exhibition of meticulously created objets d’art, on view to the public for the very first time. André Chervin (born 1927 in Paris, France), with his New York atelier, Carvin French, is one of the most acclaimed makers of handcrafted fine jewelry in the world. Yet unbeknownst to even his most ardent admirers, Chervin’s true lifetime passion was creating a collection of unique, precious objets d’art at Carvin French. These enchanting one-of-a-kind lamps, clocks, figurines, boxes, personal accessories, and table decorations, are fashioned in gold and silver, with gems such as rubies, diamonds, and sapphires and masterfully carved semi-precious stones like jadeite jade, lapis lazuli, amethyst, and rock crystal quartz.
Over the past six decades, Carvin French has manufactured thousands of magnificent pieces for Tiffany & Co., Cartier, Bulgari, Verdura, and other distinguished shops. Though revered by jewelry experts and professionals, the name Carvin French is generally unknown to the public as anonymity was essential to the firm’s success: each jewelry retailer sold the firm’s masterworks under their own brand names. Several pieces of Carvin French jewelry are shown in the exhibition, including stunning one-of-a-kind brooches such as the extraordinary Butterfly brooch, scintillating with fancy vivid yellow diamonds framed in blackened steel, made for Ralph Esmerian.
The main focus of the exhibition is on Chervin’s artistic extension beyond jewelry and his creation of bejeweled objets d’art. Conceived and engineered by Chervin and fabricated under his watchful eye by his artisans in between work on commissioned jewelry work, each objet evolved over the course of five to 25 years with most measuring a mere three to eight inches in height. Highlights include the poignant My Heavy Heart, a boudoir lamp that incorporates a large, shimmering, citrine heart poised atop an 18 karat gold wheelbarrow overflowing with colored diamond flowers.
October 13, 2023: Inside the Studio with Glass artist Erica Rosenfeld
Erica Rosenfeld lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and has an art, design and teaching practice. Using glass, found objects, food and mixed media she creates jewelry, sculptures, installations and performative works that investigate themes of fear, nostalgia, new growth, memory distortion and material association. Erica is also a founding member of The Burnt Asphalt Family, an artists’ collective with the mission to create community-centric art that meets somewhere at the crossroads between art, craft and design.
Her own work is held in private and public collections nationally and has been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY, Kentucky Museum of Art, Louisville, KY, Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI, Museum of American Glass, Millville, NJ and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI. Erica has taught at Pilchuck Glass School, Urban Glass, The Corning Museum and Worchester Center for Crafts; she has been a visiting artist at Tyler School of Art, San Jose State, University of the Arts, Pratt University and University of Louisville. Her work is included in the collection of the Museum of Arts and Design, The Essex Peabody Museum, The Toledo Museum of Art, and The Museum of American Glass.
October 20, 2023: The Past Becomes the Present: The Jewelry of Jean Prounis
Jean Prounis founded her eponymous brand in 2017 to create thoughtful jewelry that speaks to history. Inspired by her Greek heritage and by the visual language of her great-grandparents’ New York nightclub, Versailles, Prounis designs are an ode to origins. Jean reimagines ancient artifacts, like those she discovered in her bibliophile grandfather’s book collection, as objects that are elegant, wearable, and enduring. Handwrought in Manhattan’s Jewelry District with a signature 22-karat recycled gold alloy, antique diamonds, and other recovered and contemporary finds, Prounis’s museum-quality modern heirlooms sustain the legacy of fine jewelry in New York City.
