Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
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Merry Renk A Jewel in the Crown of Life 750 STUDIO. "Memory" watercolor painting of the Chicago gallery co-founded by Mary Jo Slick, Olive Oliver and Merry Renk (left to right). The gallery, unique for its time, featured fine art, craft and design. Watercolor photographs: Craft in America/Angela Mattioli. Jo Lauria JEWELER'S HEAVEN. "Memory" watercolor painting executed in 1996. Renk said: "This painting is an expression of admiration and gratitude for the hand tools I have used as a jeweler. I have known jewelers who have thirty or forty pairs of pliers, each customized for a special function, but these six pairs of pliers were all I ever needed." 51 ORNAMENT 36.2.2012 T he American studio jewelry movement lost one of its pioneers and visionaries with the passing of Merry Renk on June 17, 2012 at the age of ninety. Renk, who was also a talented painter and sculptor, was a professional goldsmith for more than thirty years. She is recognized for her achievements, most notably as co-founder and Lifetime Member of the Metal Arts Guild, San Francisco (established 1951), as a Distinguished Member of the Society of North American Goldsmiths, as a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient in 1974, and as an inductee in 1994 into the American Craft Council College of Fellows for mastery in the field. But, of course Renk's life and body of work cannot be defined merely by an account of her awards and honors, as her life was rich and full of vignettes, wonder and intrigue. Ultimately these separate chapters were connected and linked together, like the modular components of the gold and silver jewelry that the artist assembled into bracelets, necklaces and crowns fabricated from the intricate interlocking patterns that she had first worked out in cut paper, and then sawed in metal. In the end, all became dynamic and organic as she moved from one connection to the next, like an electrical current traveling the wire toward its next charge, its next point of contact.