Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
Issue link: http://ornamentmagazine.epubxp.com/i/104373
GOLDEN FOAM CROWN designed for Gerri Lanier, 1982. Photograph: Merry Renk; courtesy of Craft in America. 52 ORNAMENT 36.2.2012 WATERCOLOR PORTRAIT of Gerri Lanier wearing Golden Foam, one of Merry Renk's custom-designed gold crowns, 1995. Lanier wore this crown on special occasions, such as attending the opera. Her story began in Trenton, New Jersey. Born Mary Ruth Gibbs in 1921 she attended fine art classes at the School of Industrial Arts in Trenton while a high school student, thus revealing a talent for painting and drawing. This was also a time of personal discovery and making time for a serious relationship: she met, fell in love and in 1941 married Stanley Renk, a military officer training to fly airplane missions in World War II. During the ensuing war years, Renk actively pursued her fine art studies, only to learn in 1945 that she had become a widow when Stanley's plane crashed in the Netherlands. The formerly tentative Mary Gibbs of Trenton decided to turn the page and close that chapter of her life. The newly named Merry Renk (note spelling of "Merry"), moved to Chicago in 1946 and enrolled in the Institute of Design, with the intention of becoming an industrial designer. "I wanted to learn how to use tools," she commented in a short documentary film produced for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (in association with the exhibition "Living in a Modern Way, California Design: 1930-1960"). Renk knew she would have to make a living, and having a toolbox and knowing what to do with it seemed like the right move. The three electrifying semesters at the Institute of Design sparked her curiosity for learning and adventure. The powerful presence and design aesthetics of the Constructivist painter and sculptor Moholy-Nagy, then the director of the Institute of Design, permeated the classrooms. Renk recalled in a personal interview that she was "very influenced by my training at the school: non-objective and constructivist ideas pervaded and I swallowed them and used them whole." Writers assessing the qualities of Renk's jewelry have consistently hypothesized that it was her industrial design training at the Institute that formed the basis of her approach to jewelrymaking: the infrastructure was frequently visible and served as the main design element—such as the interlock or the fold; pieces were often comprised of simple, strong elemental shapes— such as the "V" or the sphere; and the jewelry pieces were always functional—highly wearable in their size, weight and tactility. These principles would have been the standards an industrial designer would have followed when conceptualizing a product design. Although Renk was at the Institute of Design for a relatively short time, starting in 1946 and leaving in the autumn of 1947, she was able to forge some remarkable relationships with professional artists because she was a partner-dealer in 750 Studio, located at 750 N. Dearborn Street, a gallery dedicated to showing fine art, craft and design. The other two students attending the Institute of Design who were involved in the gallery venture were Mary Jo Slick and Olive Oliver. With Renk as the requisite third partner, the trio lived in the back of the building and converted the storefront area into a gallery space. 750 Studio showed the non-objective paintings and sculptures of Moholy-Nagy as well as work of other professors of the Institute of Design, the watercolors of Henry Miller, the production jewelry of Margaret De Patta, and her own