MAG to SNAG: American Studio Jewelry 1940-1970
Channel: Cooper Hewitt
Date: 2018-04-11

The development of American studio jewelry is crucial to the understanding of contemporary jewelry as it is currently practiced internationally. Art historian Toni Greenbaum discusses
cogent issues affecting the evolution of studio jewelry in the United States during the mid-twentieth century.


Toni Greenbaum is a New York-based art historian specializing in twentieth and twenty-first century jewelry and metalwork. She wrote Messengers of Modernism: American Studio Jewelry 1940-1960, along with numerous book chapters, exhibition catalogues, and essays for arts publications; she is currently writing a monograph on modernist jeweler Sam Kramer. Greenbaum has lectured internationally at institutions such as the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, Prague; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has curated exhibitions for several museums, including the Victoria and Albert in London. Greenbaum is an associate professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, where she teaches a course in Theory and Criticism of Contemporary Jewelry.


Jewelry of Ideas: Gifts from the Susan Grant Lewin Collection is made possible in part by the Rotasa Fund, Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG), Gallery Loupe, Sienna Patti, William P. Short III, in memory of Nancy Jean Fulop Short, Helen W. Drutt English, Kim and Al Eiber and Ornamentum Gallery.