Lisa Gralnick

Lisa Gralnick

Lisa Gralnick (born 1956) is an American contemporary studio jeweler and academic.[1] In their book Makers: A History of American Studio Craft, Janet Koplos and Bruce Metcalf suggest that Gralnick was "one of the first jewelers to think like a contemporary sculptor", and they conclude that "In time, Gralnick became almost the poet laureate of American jewelers."[2] Her work is an example of what Susan Grant Lewin calls "art jewelry", by which she means "works of art by artists that exist in the jewelry format, challenging both conventions and perceptions and always centered in the world of ideas."[3] As Grant Lewin points out, jewelers like Gralnick have a somewhat tense relationship with craft, which implies an allegiance to technical skills and materials over concept. To illustrate the priorities of the art jeweler, Grant Lewin quotes Gralnick, who says: "I have chosen to make jewelry, which is traditionally considered 'craft', and I do enjoy the processes and techniques that allow me to execute my work without technical faults. But 'craft' is only a means to an end for me, as it is for many artists. My desire to push the limits of jewelry and expand on them, to comment on its traditions and associations, is more the concern of any artist."[4] Kelly H. L'Ecuyer suggests that Gralnick, like other art jewelers such as Gerd Rothmann, "exploit the 'jewelry-ness' of their work, believing that jewelry has special concerns and conceptual possibilities because of its relationship to the human body and to the social history of adornment."[5]

Childhood

Lisa Gralnick was born in New York on September 27, 1956.[6] Her father was a dentist and her mother was a nurse, and, although there were no artists in the family, she was exposed to art at a very young age and attributes her analytical mind and precise mechanical skills to her father. As a young girl, she played the violin, and thought perhaps that she would pursue a career in music but unexpectedly decided to major in art in college after taking a metals class at a local art center while still in high school.

Education and Career

Lisa received an BFA from Kent State University, Kent, Ohio in 1977 and an MFA degree in Metalsmithing from SUNY New Paltz in 1980 under Professors Kurt Matzdorf and Robert Ebendorf.[6] After completing her graduate degree, she taught at Kent State University and then Nova Scotia College of Art and Design before settling in New York City in 1982 to pursue her career as an artist full-time. In 1991, she accepted a position as Head of the Jewelry and Metals program at Parsons School of Design, a position she held until 2001 when she moved to Madison, Wisconsin to begin a position at the university. She is currently Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.[7]

Jewelry

At the beginning of her career, Lisa Gralnick was associated with Robert Lee Morris's Artwear gallery, which opened on the Upper East Side of New York City in 1978, and subsequently moved to SoHo, which was at the time the center of the New York art world. Morris aimed to "show the work of contemporary artists whose primary medium was jewelry", and his gallery included artist-made jewelry (designed by artists and manufactured by skilled producers), as well as the work of studio jewelers such as Tone Vigeland, John Iversen, Thomas Gentille and Gralnick.[8]

According to Janet Koplos and Bruce Metcalf, Gralnick became frustrated by her initial training in enamel because of its conventionality in form (requiring, like precious stones, a mount of some kind) and appearance (inherently pretty).[9] Her breakthrough came from an encounter with "a house that had been sheathed in black rubber by its eccentric owner. The industrial rubber, entirely inappropriate for a residence, rendered the house rather mysterious."[9] Asking what might happen if jewelry was similarly sheathed in black, Gralnick began making brooches from black acrylic sheet, using a vocabulary of geometric forms that Koplos and Metcalf describe as recalling "machines and architecture" but that 'also read as pure abstraction".[9] Unconventional (like a house covered in rubber), and slightly disturbing (some of the forms have similar visual qualities to handguns), Gralnick maintained the connection to jewelry through moments of beauty (contrasts of matt and polished surfaces), the use of precious materials (gold inserted into holes) and the impeccable craftsmanship of the brooches. Cindi Strauss offers another origin for the black brooches in a record that shattered in her apartment. "Gralnick glued the broken vinyl pieces of the record into a small houselike structure that sat on her bench for about a year before she began her investigations into acrylic, which eventually led to this breakthrough series."[10] For Koplos and Metcalf, Gralnick's fascination with ambiguity and her jewelry attitude to materials previously excluded from the realm of wearable ornament had a big impact on the field of American jewelry. 'In time an entire generation of college-trained jewelers would adopt this attitude toward material and form."[9] Kelly H. L'Ecuyer and Michelle Finamore also suggest that Gralnick's turn to black fits within a larger aesthetic shift in the jewelry and fine art world, where dark themes such as death, trauma and postindustrial decay were common in the 1980s and 1990s as artists grappled with the end of the Cold War, the spread of AIDs, a worldwide economic recession, and the fin de siècle cultural fears of the coming new millennium.[11]

In the 1990s, Gralnick's jewelry changed dramatically. She began to use metal, such as silver and gold, and her jewelry became more machine-like, with some pieces incorporating moving parts such as gears, levers, pulleys and weights.[12] A series from 1992, called the Anti-Gravity Neckpieces, are, according to Cindi Strauss, an outcome of Gralnick's interest in theoretical physics and the Industrial Revolution. Inspired by a paper clip and rubber band model of the expanding universe made by cosmologist Alan Lightman at a Princeton University summer class that she attended, Gralnick's neckpieces bring together cosmology and machine functionality, an exploration of "perfect movement", with weights that move up and down, or cords that wind up inside the machine-like parts.[13] Gralnick has described her jewelry as the result of "the delicate blend of opportunity emerging from a technical process that requires intelligence, mathematics, patience, analytical acumen, discipline, continued technical practice, and humility."[14]

Gralnick's relationship to conventional jewelry subjects such as love has been explored by Yvonne J. Markowitz. Speaking of the locket necklace The Tragedy of Great Love (1994), in the collection of the MFA Boston, Markowitz shows how Gralnick's square, hinged box filled with a gold wedding ring (the symbol of eternal love) and vials of salt and sugar (materials that speak to the sweet and bitter aspects of love) on a silver chain with a single gold link (a reference to the preciousness and rarity of great love), both partakes of and extends the forms and meanings of conventional jewelry.[15]

Starting with the publication in 1993 of "One of a Kind: American Jewelry Today" Lisa was often mentioned as a significant contributor to the developing field of craft and art jewelry.[16] In 2002 the American Craft Museum included some of Gralnick's "black work" in an exhibition and catalog of jewelry from the 1980s called "Zero Karat".[17] This collection emphasized the desire of jewelers of the 1980s to move away from the traditional use of gold and stones to make jewelry. For Gralnick, this was not only a statement on wealth and privilege, but a reaction to American studio jewelry of the time.[18] Gralnick's work also appears in the publications: Inspired Jewelry From the Museum of Arts and Design[19] and the scholarly book called Makers: History of American Studio Craft.[20] Finally in 2010 the Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue WA held a solo exhibition and produced a catalog based on the work of Lisa Gralnick named for a recent body of work she had finished called The Gold Standard.[7]

Selected exhibitions

Lisa Gralnick's jewelry has appeared in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions from 1980s to the present. Some of the most significant were The Art of Gold, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA (2003), Jewelry from Europe and USA, Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA (2005), RAM Tales :Women Jewelers, Racine Art Museum (2006), Metalsmiths and Mentors, at the Chazen museum, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2006), Jewelry by Artists, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2007), and Ornament as Art: The Helen Willians Drutt Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2007). She has been represented by Jewelerswerk Galerie, CDK Gallery, Galerie Ra, and Susan Cummins Gallery starting in 1988.[7]:76 The Gold Standard also traveled to the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft where it was noted as exploring our complicated relationship with precious metal.[21]

Awards/honors

During her career Gralnick was received numerous grants including 2 from the National Endowment for the Arts (1988 and 1992), 4 New York Foundation for the Art Fellowships (1987, 1991, 1995, and 1998), an Eli Lilly Foundation Grant to fund exhibition at Ball State University (2004), and most importantly the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant in 1993.[7]:75

She also participated in 2 oral interviews. One was with the Columbia University Archives of American Art, Avery Art and Architecture Library, New York in 1994 and the other was with the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Oral Interview in 2008.[1]

Public Collections

Her work can be found in numerous public collections including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Houston, the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.[22]

Media

Starting in the 1980s Art jewelry was getting coverage on the New York Times website and Lisa's work garnered attention for its bold and surreal quality.[23]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Oral Interview
  2. ↑ Koplos, Janet and Bruce Metcalf, Makers: A History of American Studio Craft, University of North Carolina Press, 2010, pp 436-7 ISBN 978-0-8078-3413-8
  3. ↑ Grant Lewin, Susan, One of a Kind: American Art Jewelry Today, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994, p 13 ISBN 978-0810931985
  4. ↑ Grant Lewin, p 13
  5. ↑ L'Ecuyer, Kelly H., "Introduction: Defining the field", in Kelly H. L'Ecuyer (ed.), Jewelry by Artists in the Studio, 1940-2000, MFA Publications, 2010, p 27 ISBN 978-0878467501
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 English, Helen W. Drutt; Dormer, Peter (1995). Jewelry of our Time. New York: Rizzoli International Publications. p. 233. ISBN 0-8478-1914-0.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Atkinson, Nora (2010). Lisa Gralnick: The Gold Standard. Bellevue WA: Bellevue Art Museum. ISBN 978-0-942-342-21-5.
  8. ↑ Finamore, Michelle Tolini, "Sculpture to Wear: Artist Designed Jewelry and the Multiples Movement", in L'Ecuyer, p 188
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 Koplos and Metcalf, p 436
  10. ↑ Strauss, Cindi, "Lisa Gralnick", in Cindi Strauss (ed.), Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry From the Helen Williams Drutt Collection, Arnoldsche, 2007, p 148 ISBN 3897902737
  11. ↑ L'Ecuyer, Kelly H. and Michelle Tolini Finamore, "New Directions: International Jewelry, 1980-2000", in L'Ecuyer, p 161
  12. ↑ Burrows, Keelin M., "Lisa Gralnick", in Strauss, p 476
  13. ↑ Strauss, p 150
  14. ↑ Quoted in Strauss, p 150
  15. ↑ Markowitz, Yvonne J., "Messages and Meanings: The Cultural Functions of Studio Jewelry", in L'Ecuyer, p 202
  16. ↑ Lewin, Susan Grant (1994). One of a Kind: American Art Jewelry Today. New York: Harry N Adams. pp. 106– 109. ISBN 0-8109-3198-2.
  17. ↑ Ilse-Neuman, Ursula; McFadden, David Revere (2002). Zero Karat: The Donna Schneier Gift to the American Craft Museum. New York: American Craft Museum. pp. 70–73. ISBN 978-1890385088.
  18. ↑ Turner, Ralph (1996). Jewelry in Europe and America: New Times, New Thinking. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd. p. 75. ISBN 0-500-27879-2.
  19. ↑ Ilse-Neuman, Ursula (2009). Inspired Jewelry From the Museum of Arts and Design. United Kingdom: ACC Editions. pp. 94–95. ISBN 978 185 1495788.
  20. ↑ Metcalf, Bruce; Koplos, Janet (2010). Makers: A History of American Studio Craft. North Carolina: UNC press. pp. 436–437. ISBN 978-0-8078-3413-8.
  21. ↑ Basker, Bradley (May 12, 2011). "Lisa Gralnick: The Gold Standard". Houston Press. Retrieved 2014-10-22.
  22. ↑ Strauss, Cindi (2007). Ornament as Art. Sttutgart, Germany: Arnoldsche Art Publishers. p. 476. ISBN 978-3-89790-273-2.
  23. ↑ Stein, Margery (November 12, 1989). "The Ultimate Marketplace; The World of Wearable Art". New York Times. Retrieved 2014-10-22.