Displaying items by tag: jeweler

It's official: the Whitney Biennial is now brought to you by Tiffany & Co.

With a $5 million gift, the high-end jeweler will be the lead sponsors for the next three editions of the contemporary art survey, through 2021. News of the sponsorship comes on the eve of the opening of the Whitney Museum of American Art's new Renzo Piano–designed building at the base of the High Line.

For almost a century, Milanese jeweler Buccellatihas kept the art of the Italian Renaissance at the core of their design philosophy, but with the opening of their Madison Avenue flagship on March 12, the house’s designers have found themselves dipping into a new creative pool: Impressionism.

Entitled "Timeless Blue," a capsule of one-of-a-kind jewels has been created in response to masterpieces by French, American and Russian masters Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Winslow Homer, Mikhail Larionov and Odilon Redon.

“I didn’t think in a million years that something like this was gonna happen in my life,” said Lee Yazzie, a famed Navajo jeweler, as he stood next to an exhibit of his and his family’s jewelry work at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in New York. Yazzie, who has worked as a silversmith since the late 1960’s said that, as he departed for New York, he told people back home that he would only believe what was happening when he would see it.

“Glittering World: the Navajo Jewelry of the Yazzie Family” is a retrospective into the decades-long work of the Gallup, New Mexico, family in the intricate art of Navajo jewelry design.

More than a decade after its initial display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Cup, crafted by Gianmaria Buccellati of the Italian jeweler, House of Buccellati, is now back on view in the museum’s Janet Annenberg Hooker Hall of Geology, Gems and Minerals. The Cup was originally dedicated to the Smithsonian in honor of the “Buccellati: Gold, Silver and Gems” exhibition, which opened at the museum in October 2000. Since then, it has been on loan to several institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Fla., in 2002, the Boca Raton Museum of Art in 2005 and at the Kremlin in Moscow from 2008 to 2009.

“Over the past 13 years, the Cup has served as a traveling ambassador for the Smithsonian,” said Jeffrey Post, curator of the National Gem Collection. “We are delighted to have it home for a while and to be able to once again exhibit it here at the Natural History Museum.”

The home of René Lalique in Wingen-sur-Mode, where the glass designer would stay when visiting his nearby factory, is currently being transformed into a luxury hotel that should start welcoming guest as Villa Lalique in the spring of 2015, Silvio Denz, CEO of Lalique and a longtime collector of the famed glass master’s perfume bottles, told Blouin Lifestyle.

Lalique, who founded his company in 1885, started his career as a jeweler, but is today probably better known for his decorative objects from perfume bottles to vases. He founded his factory in Wingen-sur Mode, which is in the Vosges in the North-east of France, in 1921 and the villa dates from the period and is typical of the architecture found in the Alsace region with half-timbering.