It’s no exaggeration to say that the work of one fine art jeweler from Seattle reflects an entire generation of metalworkers, perhaps even a whole craft movement. Ramona Solberg’s jewelry, on view in the small space upstairs at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design through March 31, may look familiar to you, even if you’ve never seen it. Just as Solberg was strongly directed in design by Ruth Penington at the University of Washington, she was very influential herself. Her work, partly idiosyncratic, partly indicative of the mid-century modernist aesthetic movement, shaped the output of many followers.
Findings: The Jewelry of Ramona Solberg, which originated at the Bank of America Gallery in Seattle, shows more than 70 examples from several stages of the artist’s evolution, together with some work by artists who influenced her, and by her students.
First off are earlier clean and spare and “Scandinavian-looking” designs by this daughter of Norwegian pioneers. These lean-lined, even plain, modernist works from the early 1950s reveal a ready mastery of precious metals, as well as an able manipulation of form.
Later, as Solberg’s work matured, her neck-pieces and brooches grew more whimsical, less earnest, more fun and quirky, and her designs began to show evidence of her interest in found-objects. Eventually unleashed from her earliest influences of formalist restraint and balance, Solberg added man- and machine-made elements as diverse and cross-cultural as African millefiori beads, dominoes from India, silver rabbits with enameled carrots, and heavy cast silver beads.
When Solberg decides to combine a watch-winder, a button, assorted Asian gambling pieces and a die all into one piece, it works. She can spin a kind of magic that adheres such disparate elements together. She seems simply to allow the ethnic possibilities of artifacts to merge with the aesthetic, and holds them together with an innate understanding of congruent form.
By the early 60s, Solberg ventured into pop culture, and by 1967, gambling and gaming pieces began to form a trademark element of her oeuvre. Examples on display are “Indian Bank” (1995), which incorporates a miniature electroformed hand putting a dime into a tin bank; “Look I’m a Winner,” which includes an “Indian bone hand,” a die and a rubber cord; and “Chinese Gambler,” featuring an ivory hand with a Chinese coin. All are arranged with intriguing results. Hands are a recurring motif, understandable in the work of a seasoned craftsperson.
Other “curios,” as she calls them — brass ship locker tabs, compasses — along with nature’s bounty of shells from the Niger River, and assorted elements of ebony, amber, ivory, bronze and silver, all find their places in her talisman-like brooches and pendants.
Solberg published Inventive Jewelry-Making (Van Nostrand, 1972), which helped make her name. The book’s craft-oriented approach democratized jewelry-making, demonstrating that beautiful design was possible whatever the materials: rubber; PVC pipe; bones.
In some instances, Solberg’s handsomely articulated clasps and fasteners are the most beautiful aspects of her necklaces. “Lucky 7” (1986) is a good example. Often she uses simple leather cords to set off the more complicated contents of the necklaces, as in “Button Rule” and “Cracker Jack Choo Choo” (1995), which become small sculptures to ride the solar plexus.
Titles of pieces often reflect travels, such as “Russian Trader,” and sources of found artifacts, as with the wooden harpoon holders from Alaska in “Seldovia” (1999).
Inspired in part by her colleague Don Tompkins, whose “Hugh Hefner” metal box pendant “medal” (1970) is one of the most amusing in the show, Solberg often employs “a rectangular framing device” and other “abacus-like constructions,” as in “Chicago Fire” (1985), where a silver fireman’s button is centered in the pendant, flanked by dominoes set within a silver “frame” with two buttons. The configuration resembles the door of a classic fire station.
Though not literally narrative, a silver piece such as the delicately poised “Shaman’s Necklace”(1968) suggests a story by its diverse elements alone. The combination of an old copper penny and objects from Brazil, Alaska and Guatemala into one integrated piece creates an alluring but indefinable kind of narrative, one that alludes the cultures from which pieces are gleaned.
Sometimes stories are merely suggested, as in “Button Rule,” which incorporates antique buttons with a caliper once used to make buttons. Some art pieces draw on existing tales. In the witty “Mr. McGregor’s” (1996), Solberg sets a Chinese ivory rabbit, a bright orange enameled carrot and millefiori beads into a silver piece that recalls Beatrix Potter characters. In “Watership Down” (1978), a special compass fitted with five silver rabbits combine with other elements to make one of her more illustrative, or literal, pieces. By contrast, “Coral Bush” (1972), a coral necklace on display, is profound in its beauty and opulent simplicity of natural materials.
The work of some of Solberg’s teachers, colleagues and students can also be found in the exhibit, among them her teacher, Ruth Penington, and an important colleague, Don Tompkins. It was the latter jeweler who inspired Solberg to make her silver and found object pendants into “subdivided rectangular formats.”
Among Solberg’s students on display is Ron Ho, who applies his mentor’s approach in “All Fall Down II” (1981) along with similar media — a domino and a button. Like the work of Solberg herself, these found objects, made for another purpose, are transformed in use and meaning into beautiful objects meant to be worn or displayed. It’s this capacity for revealing beauty in common artifacts, of raising them to the same level as precious materials, that has earned Solberg her worthy place in art history.
It’s a treat to have this work on display in Charlotte. See this exhibit in honor of the jeweler’s 80th birthday at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design through March 31, after which it will tour to two other cities. Call 704-337-2000 for more info. *
This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 1, 2002.
