Collector Profiles

AJF was started by a group of collectors who wanted to join with others in learning more about contemporary art jewelry and to show their support for jewelers and the wider field through various grants, purchases and programs. We remain committed to collectors as an important sector of the contemporary art jewelry scene. In this section of the website, you will find articles about jewelry collectors from around the world.

23 February 2013

Pascale Gallien

Damian Skinner

You will see that my jewelry is all in a couple of boxes in a corner of my private place at the end of the apartment. I don’t wear them all the time because it’s really a question of mood or until I think of them. Some of the jewelry I won’t wear for a couple of months, years sometimes, and then I come back to them. But they all are linked to my behavior, my way of life. more...
10 January 2013

Clo Fleiss

Damian Skinner

First of all, I don’t want to be a collector. I want to buy artist jewelry because I like it, I want to wear it, and I want to be different from all of the women who wear diamonds. I’m in the art world. It’s very funny that when I go to the vernissage (exhibition preview) the first thing the men and women say to me is, “What are you wearing today? Who is the artist?” It’s become like that. more...
20 October 2012

Chara Schreyer

Susan Cummins

I’m much more prone to handmade things, like Biba Schutz, very fine crafted jewelers, not artsy-fartsy things, but things that are timeless, thought provoking, an interesting dialectic of materials like the clothes I wear. more...
20 May 2012

Lasse and Helena Pahlman

Damian Skinner

What I felt in the 1970s was that contemporary art jewelry was an underground movement. The artists worked separately to the buyers and there was no contact. Nobody actually knew what was happening. Now, for me at least, I see they are more and more getting commercialized, there are galleries and more and more is being known and shown. more...
14 October 2011

The Daphne Farago Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Kelly Hays L'Ecuyer

Daphne Farago began to collect studio jewelry in the late 1980s, captivated by the physical beauty of the objects and convinced of their artistic importance. She has said that she always sought excellence and works that give her ‘joy.’ This sense of pleasure and personal connection to the work were her foremost criteria because she wore the jewelry as part of her daily life, sharing the work of these artists with others. Because she believed that wearing jewelry made it a kind of public art, she tended to acquire works that were comfortable on the body, at least for short periods. more...
06 August 2009

Elizabeth Shypertt

Sally von Bargen

I wear a Peter Macchiarini wedding ring and every time I notice it on my hand I think of Peter. He is now dead, so in a very real way his art is keeping him alive. From an artist's standpoint it must be a remarkable thing, knowing that people are carrying around a little piece of you. more...
31 July 2009

Rika Mouw

Sally von Bargen

I am a hopeless art addict. What I love about art jewelry is that its scale allows me to wear it as well as display more of it than most other art forms. I love that I can wear art and make a statement. I often wear particular pieces for specific occasions in order to create dialogue. I particularly enjoy that art jewelry has a ‘voice’ and I love using it in that sense. more...
14 July 2009

Helen Williams Drutt English

Susan Cummins

 Although I kept abundant records, they were not always precise or available. Records were destroyed in a flood in the basement in 1985 and a brief partnership, from 1987 to 1990, created a situation in which files that I had stored were not released. As a closet historian, ephemeral materials – that is, photographs, letters, lists, etc. – are essential documents. My unfulfilled desire would be to document those records as support for the actual works. I have decades of faxes and letters in storage cases waiting to be read. more...