Margo Csipö (right) squeezes Mengjie Mo’s (left) beaded necklace, which Mo made, because it has a pleasant, mushy texture. Both makers are top-10 2024 Young Artist Award finalists, photo: Nathalie Mornu

Nathalie Mornu covers the wide range of programs AJF provides to ensure it responds to the needs of its members.

In its 25+ years of existence, the American nonprofit Art Jewelry Forum has had the same mission: to advocate for and promote art jewelry. Our goal is to give visibility, credibility, and value to contemporary jewelry around the globe.

We take a multi-pronged approach. (“Pronged” … did you catch that jewelry pun? Groan … no more, promise!)

• Every week, we publish dynamic original content on our website
• We host events and conversations both online and in-person
• We award grants to makers and other people in the field
• We stimulate the marketplace by supporting galleries and collectors in myriad ways
• We produce books about art jewelry

We believe art jewelry deserves to be widely loved and deeply sought-after. Our members feel the same way. That’s why we do everything we can to increase the knowledge of consumers, artists, collectors, curators, and gallerists. People join our organization to learn about the art-jewelryverse and to help spread the word about this amazing form of wearable art.

You, too, can learn more by subscribing to our newsletter, here.

How AJF started

Susan Cummins describing AJF’s activities to a group of jewelry collectors during AJF’s trip to Switzerland, photo courtesy of Art Jewelry Forum

Susan Cummins was a dealer of art and some craft, but mostly jewelry. In 1995, while selling at the SOFA Chicago (Sculptural Objects Fine Art) fair, she invited some of her most engaged collectors to a breakfast. During the meal, she and the American jeweler Bruce Metcalf gave a presentation about the importance of forming a collectors group. Most other craft media already had collecting groups, and Cummins could see how effective they were. Cummins thought it would be a conflict of interest to start one herself. In 1996, Barbara Waldman and Judy Bloomfield started the organization.

We’re run by a 17-person board. We also have a number of committees that make decisions about such things as our publishing, events, and trips. Our current staff consists of an executive director, a managing editor, and an army of volunteers.

One of our proudest achievements may be the book Contemporary Jewelry in Perspective, which was published in 2013. At 264 pages, the wide-ranging publication involved our then-editor, Damian Skinner (from New Zealand), and a number of top contemporary jewelry experts, including Benjamin Lignel (France), Namita Wiggers (US), Liesbeth den Besten (Netherlands), Suzanne Ramljak (US), Monica Gaspar (Switzerland), Helen Carnac (UK), Kevin Murray (Australia), Elyse Karlin (US), and others. The book launched with a speaker tour that had over ten stops and involved as many of the writers as possible within the United States and Europe.

We’re also thrilled with AJF Live, which began during the pandemic. COVID-19 hit the globe right before Schmuck, the world’s most important art jewelry event. It’s held in Munich, but no one could travel, events were canceled. As the global population slipped under a blanket of isolation, we decided to bring together the community of art jewelry lovers with a weekly program of casual talks and presentations with makers, gallerists, and collectors. It was a hit! Thousands have Zoomed with us to see jewelry live and to interact with leading lights in the field. We’re deeply grateful to the hundreds of guests who have made appearances.

We are entirely funded by memberships and donations

American collector Marion Fulk and South African artist and educator Khanya Mthethwa, the winner of the 2023 Susan Beech Mid-Career Grant, at Munich’s jewelry week, March 2024, photo: Nathalie Mornu

We’re a great connector for our members, who are collectors, enthusiasts, gallerists, curators, educators, students, and makers. Our members are extremely passionate about jewelry. So as a member, you get to meet like-minded people and connect with an international community. With our programming, you can connect culturally without leaving your home, which is especially valuable for people in places with smaller art jewelry scenes. Being a member allows you to see things and meet people that you don’t have access to on your own, via our trips, meet-ups, and events.

We recently completed our strategic plan, and are currently in the process of redesigning our membership. We’re early in this process. By taking a human-centered design approach to overhauling our membership, we’re grounding our benefits in people’s needs. Our audiences have different needs, which can be parsed in different ways: audience, generation, etc. As part of our membership redesign process, we are building empathy for our audiences into the process, through research. This lets us learn what kind of problems our audiences face so that our membership benefits make a meaningful difference in our members’ lives. Our overall approach is iterative. We’re testing and learning our way through the membership redesign.

Our website is artjewelryforum.org

We publish articles every Monday. They include interviews with artists, gallerists, and collectors; reviews of books and exhibitions; and articles about a wide variety of topics within art jewelry. The website is a vast resource. It goes back about 15 years, and it’s searchable.

• Want to know about the newest currents in the field? We’ve got you covered
• Are you looking for a jewelry exhibition? We maintain a list of current and upcoming shows (here), as well as one for events (here)
• Curious about the latest news in art jewelry? We publish a news report called Have You Heard twice a month

We’re always looking for new writers! Would you like to pen a jewelry-focused article? Submit your idea here. All submissions are considered by our Editorial Advisory Committee, which consists of 11 leaders in the field. The committee also comes up with ideas for which we then commission writers.

One section of our website hosts a digital library in which we publish PDFs that we didn’t commission, but that people in the field want to share with our audience. There, you’ll find exhibition catalogs, dissertations, book excerpts, magazine articles, and more. We welcome all art jewelry-focused submissions. You can upload materials here.

Events and conversations

Most of these are free. They include AJF Live, our Zoom-based conversations with artists, gallerists, curators, educators, and even auction house directors. Our guests live all around the globe. Some of the most popular have been Helen Britton (Australia/Germany), Ruudt Peters (Netherlands), Jorunn Veiteberg (Norway/Denmark), and Melanie Bilenker (US).

Our ticketed AJF Live events offer juicy glimpses into the homes and jewelry boxes of movers and shakers—don’t you wish you’d seen the fantastical jewelry Marion Fulk (US) showed from her collection? Or got to “hang out” with Lisa Walker (New Zealand) and Karl Fritsch (Germany/New Zealand) during the pandemic?

AJF in Conversation typically takes place at jewelry weeks. During Schmuck, young collectors came on a panel to describe how the new generation is collecting. In another talk, collectors and curators discussed how they choose what they choose. At NYC Jewelry Week, collectors and gallerists have joined moderated conversations on the joy brought by collecting art jewelry.

Grants, sponsorships, & other funding

The biannual Young Artist Award honors a newcomer under 35 with $7,500, and four finalists with $1,000 each. But the cash is arguably not the greatest benefit. Making the cut gives you visibility, which can boost your career with invitations to exhibit, gallery representation, or the attention of collectors. Winners can become big names in the field. Over the years, the international prize has gone to Sergey Jivetin (Uzbekistan/US), Masumi Kataoka (Japan/US), Sharon Massey (US), Noon Passama (Thailand/Netherlands), Seulgi Kwon (Korea), Lynn Batchelder (US), Bifei Cao (China), MJ Tyson (US), Mallory Weston (US), and Bryan Parnham (US), among many others.

$20,000—that’s the award for the winner of the biannual Susan Beech Mid-Career Grant, given to applicants 35–55 years old. Past recipients have included Cristina Filipe (Portugal), to publish a book she wrote about Portuguese art jewelry. Tiff Massey (US) and Iris Eichenberg (Germany/US) both applied their winnings to help fund exhibitions of their work. And Khanya Mthethwa (South Africa) used her prize money to develop a body of work.

Via our Fiscal Sponsorship program, we’ve published a number of books, among them Dead Souls: Desire and Memory in the Jewelry of Keith Lewis; In Flux: American Jewelry and the Counterculture and Contemporary Jewelry in Perspective. (That book is sold out, but you can see the full PDF in our digital Library, here.)

And of course, we pay our freelance writers for the articles we publish on our website.

Ways we support galleries and schools

The bimonthly “On Offer” feature allows member galleries to tempt and seduce readers with one or two pieces of jewelry that are for sale. This article is hands down a reader favorite. We also publish reviews of gallery (and museum) exhibitions.

We publish the thesis work of our member schools’ outstanding students. And during our regular trips around the globe, we make sure to schedule visits to galleries and schools, where attendees get to enjoy for-AJF-only shows and dine with makers, educators, and students.

Which brings us to …

We’re a resource for collectors

During AJF’s 2022 trip to Prague, travelers enjoyed a behind-the-scenes, curator-led tour of the Museum of Applied Arts’s depository, which is closed to the public. They saw an extensive collection of Czech jewelry, both historical and contemporary. (Left to right) curator Petra Matejovicova and AJF members Karen Rotenberg, Michele Fox, Sharon Berman, and Bonnie Levine view jewelry in the archives, photo: Linda Peshkin

AJF trips are thoughtfully curated to create unique experiences. Our trips not only take attendees to galleries around the world, but offer exclusive curator-led tours of jewelry exhibitions and behind-the-scenes peeks into institutional archives. There are also private visits to meet makers in their studios and see other collectors’ homes.

We’ve published articles describing how collectors can catalogue their collections, and offering different ideas for storing and displaying them. Collectors think about the permanence of their collections and legacy, so we’ve offered a program on making donations of art jewelry to museums.

How to find out about our upcoming programs

You can visit our website, but the easiest way to learn about our activities and publishing is to subscribe to our newsletter, here. You’ll find it’s a little gem of information. (Yow! Couldn’t resist another jewelry pun!)

About Nathalie Mornu

Nathalie Mornu is the content manager for Art Jewelry Forum. She has edited nonfiction and DIY books since 2003; she is particularly passionate about titles specializing in jewelry and crafts. After studying jewelry fabrication and furniture-making for five years at the Appalachian Center for Craft, she changed course altogether and pursued a degree in journalism. Nathalie then spent a dozen years in the editorial department at Lark Books. In her tenure there, she worked with former Art Jewelry Forum editor Damian Skinner to copy edit Contemporary Jewelry in Perspective.

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G36 | jewellery | USA