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While gold's mystique is indisputable, we must resist being so entranced by its luster that we fail to recognize and consider the realities of gold at the beginning of the twenty first century. The ecologic, economic, social, and political price of gold is far costlier that we imagine. We are in the midst of a new gold rush, one that is consuming wilderness areas, contaminating watersheds, destroying ecosystems, and imperiling the economics of poor nations and the well being of indigenous people throughout the world. Some cumulative, irreparable consequences of mining will be with us, in this country and around the world, forever.... (2004) Complete Story
One function of art is to challenge the status quo-to persuade, shock, or seduce us into seeing the world, and perhaps our own attitudes and beliefs, differently. David Freda, a San Clemente , California , metal artist and enamelist makes art out of things many of us would like to step on or avoid because we consider them strange, frightening, nasty, or squirmy.... (2003) Complete Story
Not so many years ago Thomas Mann figured that 2002 would be his year to retire. But the projected date has come and gone, and Mann is busier than ever with reinvention instead of retirement. The publication in 2001 of the monograph Thomas Mann: Metal Artist may have summarized his career as a jeweler, but it didn't bring down the curtain his performance. If anything, he's busily proving F. Scott Fitzgerald's assertion that American lives lack second acts..... (2003) Complete Story
Silver has been a part of American domestic ritual and tradition since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when bourgeois families used coffee and tea services, serving utensils, and other silver domestic objects in imitation of their English Counterparts. A robust American silver design and manufacturing industry gross a, people of means were no longer satisfied to live with homemade utensils and furnishings, and fine craftsmen became a part of the social-culturaleconomic nexus. The wealthy had sterling silver gravy hosts, porringers, and crumb trays, and the middle classes had silverplated items of similar design. Even the big silver designers such as Gorham and Tiffany created whimsical and ornate holloware and utensils according to the prevailing design motifs of the time. Commercially available modernist pitchers from the 1930s seem close cousins of Muir's vessels.... (2004) Complete Story
Jewelry plays an ancient and well-documented role in broadcasting social status, but charm bracelets, known to almost all American women and girls since at least the 1940s, are also distantly related to traditional charms or amulets, carried for millennia to protect the wearers avert danger, or ensure good fortune. Mesopotamian amulet seals date from the 5th millennium.... (2004) Complete Story
