The ninety international artists represented in Ring Redux: The Susan Grant Lewin Collection imagine jewelry as a thought-provoking medium, resonating with contemporary art, design, craft, and technology. These artists show a mastery of both traditional and unconventional materials, with rings ranging from gold, diamond, and pearls to found sunglass lenses and goat hair. Innovative techniques and conceptual pieces show jewelers who have given free flight to their imaginations to create objects imbued with sensitivity and humor, beauty and power, subtlety or drama. Ring Redux includes improvisations on the ring form dating from the 1950s to the present, arranged around six themes: Real to Surreal, Drawings in Space, Darkness to Light, Tender to Tough, Geometry Devolves, and All About Color.
This exhibition presents rings by artists who have reinvented an enduring jewelry form with a distinctively contemporary sense of experimental craft. Two videos and one hundred rings highlight five decades of collecting by Susan Grant Lewin, one of the foremost collectors of 20th- and 21st-century art jewelry.
Ring Redux: The Susan Grant Lewin Collection is organized by the SCAD Museum of Art, and curated by Ursula Ilse-Neuman. The presentation at NOMA is supported by the Elise M. Besthoff Charitable Foundation.
Phototropist (Domestic Wildness series)
2019
Vania Ruiz
Resin, fabric, ink, varnish
114.3 x 101.6 x 63.5 mm; 4 1⁄2 x 4 x 2 1⁄2 in.
Collection of SCAD Museum of Art, Gift of Susan Grant Lewin
No. 2 (Full Hansen Disease—Deformation as an Object series)
2016
Ariel Lavian
Copper, various patinas
Collection of SCAD Museum of Art, Gift of Susan Grant Lewin
Sunny Ring
2005
Jiro Kamata
Sunglass lenses, gold
Collection of SCAD Museum of Art, Gift of Susan Grant Lewin
Pink is Gold
2018
Agustina Ros
Blown borosilicate glass, gold
Collection of SCAD Museum of Art, Gift of Susan Grant Lewin