Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
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30 ORNAMENT 35.5.2012 EGYPTIAN PECTORAL of gold and silver with inlays of carnelian and glass; 11.2 x 36.5 x 0.5 centimeters, Second Intermediate Period, Dynasties 13–17, 1783–1550 B.C. Egyptian Special Purchase Fund, William Francis Warden Fund, Florence E. and Horace L. Mayer Fund. want to pay top dollar for a piece that has been restored? Or are you willing to take a piece that has restoration because it's one-of-a-kind? And as for antiquities, if you're going to do restoration, how far do you go?" She has co-curated several exhibitions at the museum, starting with Mummies and Magic: The Funerary Arts of Ancient Egypt in 1988, for which she assisted in the installation, design, illustration, and research. Then came Pharoahs of the Sun: Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and Tutankhamen, in 1999, which then traveled to Chicago, Los Angeles and Leiden, Holland. For the 2002 exhibition, Egypt in the Age of the Pyramids: Highlights from the Harvard University- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Expedition, she again worked with Rita Freed, and wrote part of the catalog. Two years into her endowed curatorship, in 2008, Markowitz solely curated a dazzling exhibition: Imperishable Beauty, Art Nouveau Jewelry (see Ornament, Vol. 31, No. 5), showcasing forty superb European and American pieces, on loan from a single collector. Her first exhibition, installed in the Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Family Foundation Gallery, Jewels, Gems, and Treasures: Ancient to Modern, will be on view until summer 2013. Markowitz has written a book to complement the exhibition, Artful Adornments: Jewelry from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The endowed curatorship and gallery are the crown jewels of Markowitz's career. But none of this would have happened without everything that led to her fortuitous meeting with MFA Trustee Susan B. Kaplan, who had her own vision––which was a dream come true for Markowitz. "I was giving a lecture on ancient Egyptian beadwork, eight or nine years ago," says Markowitz, "Susan came to that lecture, and she was very quiet. She wasn't like the Egyptophiles that love everything Egyptian, and go to everything. She suggested we have lunch sometime, and we had lunch—about two years before the position is endowed—and she said, 'It's been my dream to have a jewelry gallery here, what could one do with something like that?' So I said, 'well, who would determine what goes in there, what shows and all?' So she said, 'maybe we need a jewelry curator.' And I thought, that would be nice––and I could do jewelry full time, and so that's how that came about. "If you're going to be endowed by someone who's living, I can't think of a better person, because she's fun, she has a passion for jewelry. In the spring we go to London to the shops and we're like two crazy ladies when we see a fabulous piece of jewelry. Susan likes historic jewelry, especially nineteenth century and Art Deco, and she has a fabulous eye." Kaplan adds, "In London we're great travelers together because we're focused on the same thing. We'll be in a store for two or three hours, not necessarily to buy anything––but just to see things you don't see elsewhere. Handling the jewelry is important, turning it over, looking for marks. We saw a lot of jewelry and sometimes we found things the museum was interested in. You try to find donors. There are several supporters of the MFA that are interested in jewelry." As the first dedicated curator of jewelry in a major United States fine arts museum, Markowitz has brought the medium itself into a larger context that is changing the way museums are thinking about jewelry. The Van Cleef & Arpels exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design in New York had lines so long, people waited hours to get in. In the fall of 2011, an exhibition entitled International Art Jewelry: 1895-1925, opened at the Forbes Galleries, in New York, and continued into 2012. Kaplan hopes