Over a 70-year career, Baltimore artist Betty Cooke has gained a reputation for being one of the most prolific and inventive jewelers in the country.
Next month, the Walters Art Museum will present the first major museum retrospective of Cooke’s work, starting in the 1940s and continuing into the 21st century.
“Betty Cooke: The Circle and the Line,” is the title of an exhibition that explores her jewelry and design practice, presenting a comprehensive overview of her body of work and the themes she has explored. It opens Sept. 19 and runs until Jan. 2.
“Betty Cooke’s storied career is a testament to both her incredible artistry and her fearless attitude toward seizing opportunities,” said Julia Marciari-Alexander, Andrea B. and John H. Laporte Director of the Walters Art Museum, in a statement. “This exhibition is the perfect opportunity both to demonstrate how living artists provide new perspectives on our collection and to celebrate one of Baltimore’s most inspiring and venerable women in the arts.”
The exhibit is curated by independent scholar Jeannine Falino, assisted by coordinating curator Jo Briggs, Jennie Walters Delano Curator of 18th- and 19th-Century Art at the Walters. The title plays off Cooke’s penchant for working with clean lines and simple forms.
“I can spend years with a circle,” the museum quotes her as saying. “If you have the ideas and the materials, the results are limitless.”
Cooke is “one of the country’s most innovative jewelers,” Falino said in a statement. “Over the course of her career, she has created works that are faithful to the tenets of good design, the basis of which is the axiom ‘less is more.’ Her works are memorable for their utter simplicity and cool sophistication.”
Cooke, 97, grew up in Baltimore and attended the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she also taught for 22 years. The first place she worked was a studio, showroom, and residence on Tyson Street, a few blocks from the Walters.
In 1965, Cooke and her husband and business partner William O. Steinmetz, who passed away in 2016, moved to The Village of Cross Keys in north Baltimore, where they opened The Store Ltd.
Cooke was one the first tenants at Cross Keys. Over the years, her jewelry has been featured in Vogue and received two Diamonds Today awards from DeBeers. In 1996 she was made a Fellow of the American Craft Council. She continues to sell her jewelry at Cross Keys, along with folk art, clothing, and high-end housewares.
“Below the surface of Cooke’s work are deeply personal, witty, and emotional meanings,” the museum states on its website. “She is inspired by the natural world, especially animals and birds, as well as kinetic forms, and uses materials as varied as metal tubing, enamel, wood, and gemstones. Cooke’s strong sense of composition underlies all of her work and is based in her conviction that with ‘a circle and a line, you can make anything.’ ”
The exhibit features more than 160 works loaned from the Cranbrook Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and private collectors, as well as Cooke’s own collection.
Besides her jewelry, it includes photography, drawings and some of Cooke’s design sketches, along with leather handbags and accessories that Cooke developed in addition to her jewelry business. Her leather designs won national awards during the 1950s and were featured in Woman’s Day magazine.
Growing up in Baltimore, Cooke visited the Walters in her childhood and cites its medieval armor collection as one of her favorite areas. As part of the new exhibit, the curators are displaying works from the Walters’ collections, including an ancient bronze hand mirror; an Egyptian hippopotamus figurine, and a 19th-century landscape painting by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, to show the creative connections Cooke made during her early trips to the museum.
Organized both thematically and chronologically, “Betty Cooke: The Circle and the Line” explores the iterative and experimental nature of Cooke’s designs, showing the evolution of her practice through the years as she occasionally revisited design concepts, or incorporated new elements to create wholly new works. A section of the exhibition displaying Cooke’s pins, brooches, and neckpieces tracks her use of movement to craft pieces that invite wearers to take an active role in their display.
“Betty Cooke’s works demonstrate a consistent approach to materials and composition that makes her designs instantly recognizable and at the same time endlessly variable,” Briggs said. “As an independent female designer and maker, Cooke represents a generation of successful women entrepreneurs who emerged in the postwar era. Her incredible career is the result of her passion for design, independent frame of mind, and deep-rooted work ethic.”
In 2019, Cooke endowed the William O. Steinmetz ’50 and Betty Cooke ’46 Chair in Design at MICA, the first endowed chair in its design department.
The Walters exhibit will be accompanied by an illustrated publication, with an essay by Falino and reflections by a number of friends and collectors. “The Circle and the Line: The Jewelry of Betty Cooke” is published by the Walters Art Museum in association with D Giles Limited.
Ed Gunts is a local freelance writer and the former architecture critic for The Baltimore Sun.
"artist" - Google News
August 02, 2021 at 07:32PM
https://ift.tt/3xkwnxd
Baltimore jewelry artist Betty Cooke getting retrospective at Walters Art Museum - Baltimore Fishbowl
"artist" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2FwLdIu
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Baltimore jewelry artist Betty Cooke getting retrospective at Walters Art Museum - Baltimore Fishbowl"
Post a Comment