Editor’s Picks
NATIVE VISIONARIES
“Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology” at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, California, where Native futurism uses fashion and traditional craft to envision a better tomorrow for Native Americans. The exhibition is currently open through June 21, 2026.
TRANSFORMATION MASK by Shawn Hunt (Heiltsuk) of mixed media including acrylic, resin, LED lights, and Microsoft HoloLens, 2017. Photograph by Patrick R. Benesh-Liu.
Volume 46, No. 3
Table of Contents
Features
Lynn & K Meta Reintsema
Architecture in Motion
The Path of Conscious Beauty
Seth Michael Carlson
Marie Antoinette Style
Cambay, Idar-Oberstein, Czechslovakia and France
Competitors in the African Trade
Departments
Textile Trends in History.
Global Threads. India’s Textile Revolution
Seth Michael Carlson Showcase.
Asian Fashion Today.
Andrew Gn Fashions the World
Korean Quiltwork Crosses Borders
Bojagi and Beyond: My Cup over Flows. Chunghie Lee Invitational
ARCHITECTURE IN MOTION
Patrick R. Benesh-Liu delves into the more than thirty-five years of making clothing by the Reintsema sisters, Lynn & K Meta. From their artist mother and the complicated example she set for the two daughters, who found a path together on the craft show trail, their elegant and structural art-to-wear speaks to the deep voice of the hand.
THE GLOBAL AGATE TRADE
Robert K. Liu examines the talhakimt, a Tuareg agate fertility amulet, first made by East Indians, then with better agate and lapidary techniques by Germans in Idar-Oberstein. Due to competition for a share of the African trade in ornaments, the Czechs and French then produced molded glass versions, in various colors and sizes.
ASIAN FASHION TODAY
The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts brings Singaporean fashion designer Andrew Gn to the United States.
The Process of Becoming
We Share with You the Jewelry Collection of the late Ornament Coeditor, Carolyn L.E. Benesh, who forged strong and intimate bonds with many of the artists whose work she purchased.
Articles, Past and Present
The Expression of the Handmade Makes Itself Felt through Genuineness.
What was Made Took a Combination of Skill and Ingenuity, Birthed From That Mysterious Dark Place of Imagination.
Wearable Art
It came about as a nexus in the 60s and 70s, referencing a freeform fusion of heretofore two-dimensional art and applying it to the canvas of the human being. These clothes as costume and costume as clothes birthed off a movement that still has its adherents even now, in the contemporary age.
Jewelry has had to find itself in the Modernist age, transcending the fine jewelry of wealth at the turn of the century, and reaching mid-century the abstracted explorations of material, composition, and storytelling that would yield to the contemporary art jewelry movement. Today, contemporary art jewelry remains a creatively vibrant field, a cross-disciplinary cooperation that branches off into academic work and that sold at craft shows.
We bring you the broad spectrum of human self-expression in wearable art, from the ancient and the ethnic, to the contemporary. Both here in the United States, and abroad.
Here are a few of the jewelers and clothing makers in the wearable art community for your enjoyment. We will continue to rotate this selection each month, so you will always find superlative new work to explore.
AMY NGUYEN, SHIBORI DYED CLOTHING
KEN LOEBER & DONA LOOK, JEWELRY
BIBA SCHUTZ, JEWELRY
JANICE KISSINGER, HAND-DYED FELTED CLOTHING
K. RILEY, HANDMADE BLOCK-PRINT CLOTHING
JUDITH KINGHORN, JEWELRY
Intelligent Reading.
Enter a world where experience and skill cooperate with imagination and materials to create astounding objects. The spectrum of human adornment extends from tribal and folk cultures around the globe, to the rarefied heights of the fashion industry, to contemporary art jewelry and craft which seeks to explore new boundaries.
Patrick R. Benesh-Liu delves into the more than thirty-five years of making clothing by the Reintsema sisters, Lynn & K Meta. From their artist mother and the complicated example she set for the two daughters, who found a path together on the craft show trail, their elegant and structural art-to-wear speaks to the deep voice of the hand.