Displaying items by tag: racine art museum

Jewelry has the ability to convey complex meaning unlike almost any other kind of object. It is and has been: handmade, mass-produced; a possession, a gift, a symbol; a means to reflect social and cultural status, a means to reflect something personal. Its power applies to commercial, mass-produced jewelry (especially when it is given as a gift) yet is even greater when jewelry itself is considered as subject — who made it and why, who wears it and how.

Contemporary art jewelry often investigates cultural, social, personal and environmental topics. Distinguished by a vocabulary of diverse media from precious metals to recycled objects, it also reflects artist’s interests in material exploration and notions of wearability. RAM’s holdings in art jewelry — with examples from artists across the globe and at varying stages in their career — are growing rapidly.

Thanks to a generous gift from longtime museum donors, Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art added 37 new pieces, including vessel forms and sculpture, to their permanent glass collection. The acquisition includes works by notable glass artists such as Michael Glancy (b. 1950), Klaus Moje (b. 1936), Ann Warff Wolff (b. 1937), and Richard Marquis (b. 1945).

LACMA’s glass art collection, which focuses on studio glass from the mid-1960s to the late 1990s, contains more than 100 objects, most of which came from Greenberg and Steinhauser who started donating to the institution in 1984. The museum’s relationship with the couple is so strong that earlier this year Greenberg and Steinhauser invited LACMA officials to handpick works from their personal collection for the museum. Besides their substantial glass gift, Greenberg and Steinhauser made a monetary donation to LACMA to go towards educational programs about glass.

Greenberg and Steinhauser’s collection boasts 400 to 500 works and is considered among the top five studio glass collections in the United States. The couple began avidly collecting in the mid-1970s and slowed down around the mid-1990s when sculpture and nontraditional forms became more prominent than the vessel art they adored. The duo has since taken to collecting contemporary photography.

In celebration of the studio glass movement’s 50^th anniversary, Greenberg and Steinhauser decided to disperse most of their collection to a number of institutions across the country. The couple will keep 15 to 20 sentimental pieces for themselves and the rest of their works will go to LACMA, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, and the Corning Museum of Glass. Greenberg also hopes to donate works to the Smithsonian, New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, the Mint Museum, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, and the Racine Art Museum, although arrangements with those institutions still need to be made.