What is jewelry? Why do we wear it? What meanings does it carry? Traversing time and space, this exhibition explores how jewelry acts upon and activates the body it adorns.
This global conversation about one of the most personal and universal of art forms brings together some 230 objects drawn almost exclusively from The Met collection. A dazzling array of headdresses and ear ornaments, brooches and belts, necklaces and rings will be shown along with sculptures, paintings, prints, and photographs that will enrich and amplify the many stories of transformation that jewelry tells.
Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website
Whether or not you go, the exhibition catalog, Jewelry: The Body Transformed, provides a cross-cultural examination of jewelry spanning 5,000 years. Investigating not only the objects themselves but also the bodies they decorated, it illustrates how these various definitions of the body give meaning to the jewelry that adorns it. More than 200 examples of exceptional jewelry and ornaments, created across the globe from antiquity to the present, are shown alongside paintings and sculptures of bejeweled bodies to demonstrate the social, political, and aesthetic role of jewelry. From earflares of warrior heroes in Pre-Columbian Peru to designs by Yves Saint-Laurent, these precious and most intimate works of art provide insight not only about the wearer but also into the designers, artisans, and cultures that produced them. As an art form, jewelry is defined primarily through its connection to and interaction with the body—extending it, amplifying it, accentuating it, distorting it, concealing it, or transforming it. But how is the meaning of jewelry bound to the body that wears it?
Select Jewelry: The Body Transformed to learn more, or to place this book in your Amazon shoppingcart. Your Amazon purchase through this link generates a small commission that will help to fund the ArtGeek.art search engine.
