Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
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32 ORNAMENT 35.5.2012 POLYP COLONY, by John Paul Miller, of pure gold, eighteen karat gold, enamel; 1995. The Daphne Farago Collection. THE COLT FAMILY SUITE IN THREE PARTS: Necklace of gold, enamel and diamond (mine cut); 1856. Retailed by Tiffany & Co. Frank B. Bemis Fund, William Francis Warden Fund, and anonymous funds. NECKLACE, by Art Smith, of silver, turquoise, rhodochrosite, chrysoprase, and amethyst (or garnet); 43.8 x 26 x 1.9 centimeters, circa 1958. The Daphne Farago Collection. bachelor of science in biological sciences at the University of Maryland. Later, after studying art therapy at Boston University, she worked as an art therapist for eight years. Rather than using art as a tool for therapeutic healing, as the title suggests, her job was to predict the volatility of violent criminals by using visually-based psychological tests for aid in sentencing and competency hearings. "I burnt out working as an art therapist so I said to my husband, 'what should I do?' and he said, 'you could always go to medical school,' I said—'I don't think so. I'm in my early thirties'––and he asked, 'what have you always wanted to do?' and I said, 'I've always loved ancient Egypt.' Brandeis had a doctoral program in Egyptology headed by the Egyptian scholar Louis Zabkar." And that led to her second career. ˇ After her coursework at Brandeis, Markowitz interned at the MFA from 1987-88. Lacovara, her mentor, had her measuring, researching and cataloging four thousand ancient Egyptian scarabs when the museum was reorganizing storage in the basement. She was then hired in 1989 as an illustrator, creating cross-sections of Greek vases, or drawing partial objects in completion, to help readers visualize the objects as they were in their entirety. In 1998, she became a research fellow, evaluating the entire jewelry collection, until the endowed curatorship began in 2006. Markowitz is challenging the very definition of what valuable jewelry is. She is breaking the high-style barrier for fine arts museums. "Something I love about her," says Malcolm Rogers, the MFA's Ann and Graham Gund Director, "unlike many museum professionals, she's not snobby about stones—or rather 'inverse snobby' about stones. Many museums collect jewelry, but only if it doesn't have huge diamonds or emeralds in it." Her most challenging acquisition, says Markowitz, was the Marjorie Merriweather Post brooch, which is set with a sixty- carat, carved Mughal seventeenth-century emerald, surrounded