Antiquemania Lecture

Join the School of Continuing and Professional Studies (SCPS) at an event to celebrate New York City Jewelry Week—a festival dedicated to promoting the world of jewelry through innovative NYC focused programming. SCPS presents a lecture related to: ANTIQUEMANIA. Curated by Ana Estrades and Sasha Nixon, ANTIQUEMANIA showcases the work of contemporary jewelry designers inspired by ancient and historical jewelry, motifs, and techniques. Guided by Professor Patricia Madeja, Coordinator for the Fine Art Jewelry Program at Pratt, SCPS offers a Jewelry Design and Marketing Certificate.

ANTIQUEMANIA artists, Alicia Jane Boswell, Ashley Buchanan, Isabelle Busnel, Jeanette K. Caines, Kelly Jean Conroy, Rachel Andrea Davis, and Miranda Leigh will discuss their respective creative processes and historical references found in their work. The presentations will be followed by a round table discussion between the artists and curators, Sasha Nixon and Ana Estrades. The discussion will be moderated by Karen Bachmann.

Pratt student, faculty and alumni can reserve complimentary tickets. General public tickets are $10.

PURCHASE TICKETS

SPEAKER BIOS

Professor Karen Bachmann teaches at both Pratt Institute and Fashion Institute of Design. She specializes in jewelry, holloware, and decorative art. She has particular interests in medieval memento mori and 19th century sentimental work. She is a practicing studio jeweler and a former master jeweler at Tiffany & Co. She has had work published in Art Jewelry Today and the Lark 500 series books. Written published work includes Hairy Secrets: Human Relic as Memory Object in Victorian Hairwork Jewelry Her most recent publication is an essay on hairwork in the book Death: a Graveside Companion, Thames & Hudson.

Isabelle Busnel
After a 15-year career in finance and banking, an urge to express herself in a different way led her to retrain academically. Ms. Busnel obtained her HND in Jewelry in 2008 and a Research MA in 2010, both from the Sir John Cass Department of Art, Media and Design (London Metropolitan University). Busnel is a member of Dialogue Collective, a group of London-based jewelers and silversmiths. She is currently collaborating with La Garantie, a French contemporary jewelry association.

Alicia Jane Boswell received her MFA in Metalsmithing/Jewelry from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Alicia resides in West Palm Beach Florida where she was the Jewelry & Metalsmithing Artist-In-Resident at the Armory Art Center in 2016/17. She is currently on the board of The Enamelist Society, adjunct professor at both Broward & Palm Beach State College & Enameling/Metalsmithing workshop instructor at the Armory Art Center.She has attained positions of visiting professor, artist-in-residence, and visiting instructor at arts & crafts education centers around the United States & internationally. Her work can be found in public & private collections including the Enamel Arts Foundation, LA & The Lace Museum in Sunnyvale California, The Speed Art Museum, Louisville KY & the Mordes Collection West Palm Beach, Florida.

Ashley Buchanan is a full-time jewelry artist currently based in Atlanta, Georgia. She participates in high end craft shows across the country and sells her work in galleries, shops and online. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and museums such as The Racine Art Museum, the Museum of Art and Design in New York and SOFA Chicago to name a few. Ashley’s work has been published in two of the Showcase 500 Series Books, Ornament Magazine, Metalsmith Magazine, and she was featured in American Craft Magazine as one of the short-listed artists for the Emerging Voices Award. She is a 2014 NICHE finalist and was also selected as one of the ten finalists for the LEAP award at the Society for Contemporary Craft. When making her powder coated, metal jewelry she focuses on image, pattern and decoration in order to reference ornamentation and historical jewelry. Ashley’s goal is to create wearable works of art that push the boundaries of jewelry while maintaining a clean, contemporary aesthetic.

Jeanette K Caines is a master goldsmith with over 28 years experience. She is the Director and owner of Jewelry Arts Inc, the leading jewelry school in New York City and the only center for teaching ancient jewelry making techniques in the world. Her current projects include an Etruscan technique analysis and reproduction with The Metropolitan Museum of Art and a study with the College of Art and Design at Beijing University of Technology to document and revive the almost lost art of Chinese Filigree. She is the award winning author of Soldering Demystified and is featured in the 2016 PBS Nova special Treasures of the Earth: Metals.

Kelly Jean Conroy considers herself to be equal part teacher and maker. She teaches full time Metalsmithing at Lincoln Sudbury High School in Sudbury, MA, as well as Jewelry courses at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, and at Metalwerx, a school for jewelry in Waltham, MA. She completed her BFA at Syracuse University in Art Education and Painting, and her MFA in Jewelry Metals from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2013. Kelly’s specialties are enameling, working with natural materials: carving bone, piercing mother of pearl, and casting.

Rachel Andrea Davis is a studio artist, educator, and studio technician from Milwaukee. She received her BFA from Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her MA from Kent State University. Davis’ work has been exhibited in Earrings Galore 2017 through Heidi Lowe Gallery; Waterloo Arts Juried Exhibition in Cleveland, Ohio; and Upsetting The Stone and the Juried Student Exhibition through the Society of North American Goldsmiths. Most recently, she won the Juror’s Choice Award through Ethical Metalsmiths International Student Exhibition So Fresh + So Clean 2017. Most recently, she was the Instructional Services Specialist of Jewelry & Metal Arts at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

Ana Estrades is a jewelry historian, educator and curator, with an MA in decorative arts from the Bard Graduate Center. Currently, she teaches Gems and Jewelry at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York, and she is working as Sales Coordinator at Fred Leighton/ Kwiat Salon in Madison Ave. Her research interests range from early modern to contemporary jewelry and designers; collectors and collecting; and issues relating to provenance and authenticity. Some of her recent projects include research and interpretation for the digital interactive of the BGC exhibition “NY Crystal Palace 1853,” which won the 2017 New Media Award from the Victorian Society in America, as well as image research and copyright for David Yurman’s publication with Rizzoli “Cable.” Ana is very excited to be co-curating the exhibition Antiquemania during NYC inaugural Jewelry Week this November.

Miranda Leigh is an artist and social entrepreneur who lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. She founded her company, Joyaux Marisol LLC, to make jewels that delight, protect, and empower. She designed the Marisol® umbrella in response to the rape epidemic in Eastern Congo and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in fashion and sustainability at Glasgow Caledonian University’s Fair Fashion Center in New York. Miranda holds a master’s degree from The Bard Graduate Center, where she specialized in European gems, jewels, regalia, and lapidary treatises.

Sasha Nixon is a curator, jewelry historian, and practicing metalsmith. Her Masters Degree is from Bard Graduate Center in New York City in the decorative arts, material culture, and design history. Her specialization is in the study of contemporary art jewelry, particularly of how individual artists are influenced by ancient and historical jewelry styles and techniques. She received the 2018 Windgate curatorial internship at the Museum of Arts and Design and is co-curator of MAD’s exhibition Fake News and True Love: Fourteen Stories by Robert Baines (October 2018-March 2019). She was awarded the 2018 Society of North American Goldsmith’s emerging curators grant for her exhibition A View from the Jeweler’s Bench: Ancient Treasures, Contemporary Statements, to be presented by Bard Graduate Center Gallery (February-July, 2019); and is currently co-curating the exhibition ANTIQUEMANIA, held at Pratt Manhattan during the inaugural New York City Jewelry Week (November 12-17, 2018). Nixon presented her paper “Pixels Bejeweled: Modern Media, Contemporary Jewelry, and the Replication of Desire” at the Fashion Institute of Technology’s international symposium Digital Meets Handmade: Jewelry in the 21st Century last may. That paper and “In the Studio: Lin Cheung,” written for Metalsmith Magazine will be published later this year.