OPENING: Craft materials featured in art jewelry exhibit at Claire Oliver Gallery in New York City

Charlotte Potter, The Weight of Lost Friendship (back). Hand-engraved glass, sterling silver, metal, wax, chains. courtesy: claire oliver gallery

“Beyond Bling: The Artist as Jeweler,” which opens at Claire Oliver Gallery tonight, will showcase unique and limited edition necklaces, bracelets, rings, and pins created specifically for the exhibition by more than 30 artists, a number of whom use glass. Pieces by Charlotte Potter, Beth Lipman, Martin C. Herbst, and Andrew Erdos showcase the material, while others use materials as varied as paint, collage, stoneware, and rapid prototyping. Perhaps the strangest material used in the show appears in Bernardi Roig’s Jewel, a ring with a stone made of an art critic’s cholesterol biliary vesicles.

Beth Lipman, Residue Collar, 2012. Argentinium, glass, glue. H 62, W 16, D 8 in. courtesy: claire oliver gallery

Potter contributed multiple hand-engraved glass necklaces, contemporary cameos depicting pigs, hands, and men and women. Some of her jewelry appears under the “Charlotte’s Web” section of her art website, and she does maintain a separate jewelry website for her fused glass earring designs. Like many other artists in the exhibition, jewelry is not her primary artistic focus. In the exhibition’s press release, the gallery points out that “internationally renowned individuals from virtually every major artistic genre over the past five centuries have created jewelry-based artworks,” noting that artists such as Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder, Man Ray, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, and Damien Hirst have all been included in recent major exhibitions of jewelry.

—Grace Duggan