ORNAMENT STAFF IN DOWNSIZED OFFICE IN 2016, showing part of our library, which takes up the largest portion of our present space, perhaps the most comprehensive private library on jewelry and clothing, and very strong in publications on beads. This photograph was taken by Carol Sauvion, the Director of Craft in America, owner of Freehand Gallery and a close friend, before Carolyn passed in 2020. The other member of our staff, design consultant Stephanie Schreiber, is in Hawaii. *Photograph by Carol Sauvion*.

ROBERT K. LIU AND THOMAS JENKINS in the 1960s, having lunch on the sign for Salt Creek in Death Valley, which was the habitat for one of the pupfish I studied. Jenkins was my office mate at UCLA, and a trout behaviorist. *Photograph by the late Professor Vlad Walters, an active member of my dissertation committee.*

DR. BOYD W. WALKER at his 1980 retirement party from the Zoology Department, UCLA. *Photograph by Carolyn L.E. Benesh or Robert K. Liu/Ornament.*

Fifty years ago this Fall, the predecessor of Ornament was born, in 1974 as The Bead Journal, which soon expanded its coverage beyond beads into all personal adornment and morphed into Ornament by 1979, concentrating on jewelry and clothing. Ironically, when our publishing odyssey started, it was just the late Carolyn L.E. Benesh and I as staff, plus Phil Shima, a designer/cover photographer who was hired for each issue. Now it is still only two of us, Patrick Benesh-Liu and I, plus our present distant design consultant and former staff designer, Stephanie Schreiber, in Hawaii. Patrick joined the staff in 2001, while still in high school. At our largest employment, after moving from Los Angeles to Vista, California, in our 25th year, we had a staff of ten. This compares to the other extant full coverage craft magazine, American Craft, which has a current staff of fifteen. In this article, I try to give our readers a brief snapshot of part of our history.

Carolyn graduated as a fine art major from the University of Michigan, and was working as an office administrator, while I had received my Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1969, on the evolution of mating behavior in pupfishes. While still finishing my dissertation and after, I worked as a research gerontologist in the Department of Pathology at the UCLA School of Medicine, on extending lifespan in mice and annual fishes from South America, using caloric undernutrition for the strains of genetically specific mice and different ambient temperatures and food intake for the fish, while sampling their immune states, and other biological parameters of aging, fecundity, growth, and disease. Both the mice and fish experiments showed that we could increase lifespan, with fish living twice as long in lower temperatures. The publications resulting from these studies are still cited, as few are able to finance such large scale aging studies, based on big enough populations of animals to be statistically valid, born or hatched at the same time, and which in nature have a relatively short lifespan, necessary for aging studies.

Since then, I have continued to occasionally write scientific papers in my former fields of ichthyology/ethology; in 2013, Tony Echelle and I published on the behavior of the unique El Potosi pupfish from Mexico, which went extinct at that time.

During the period when I was at the UCLA School of Medicine, I had been working with a firm that sold antiquities, through association with a graduate school friend, which prompted me to delve deeper into the history of adornment, and make jewelry, usually necklaces, that I sold privately or at Brentano’s, a bookstore on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills that had a clientele with money and a taste for unusual jewelry. Since by then I had sons David and Jon with my first wife Esther, this avocation helped augment my modest UCLA salary. Thankfully, I had photographically documented most of this jewelry, which surprised me as to how many pieces I had made, as well as covering other family and work activities. Looking back, I would have never remembered much if I had not annotated the back of my hundreds of black/white proofsheets or the data sheets for our thousands of color slides and keeping daily journals, now numbering 118.

After leaving graduate school, I remained close to my late major professor and his wife, Boyd Walker and MaryEv, as all of us were interested in the then explosive import of beads from Africa, as well as lesser numbers from Asia, of which little was known. Bead societies were born, the Los Angeles one being the first in the world, as well as one that gave grants to bead researchers, and we frequently met at the Walkers’ wonderful rustic hilltop Pacific Palisades home, entirely planted with succulents; bazaars were held in their spacious yard, attended by sizeable numbers of bead collectors, jewelers, dealers, and the public. Realizing the need for information on these bead imports, as well as beads in general, Boyd suggested I start a journal on beads, with seed money of $1500 from the Walkers.

With our backgrounds of fine art and biomedical sciences, neither of us knew anything about the large amounts of money required to publish a magazine, especially on a continual basis, and the specialized skills involved for the print process. Soon it was apparent how much time it took to do the research, write the articles, shoot the accompanying images, and to turn everything into layouts suitable for printing. Thankfully, being at a major university with good libraries really helped with researching our articles, as no Internet was extant then. Additionally, having been an ethologist who studied the comparative behavior of closely related fishes, trained my eye in comparing items that look similar, important in writing about any aspect of personal adornment, whether jewelry or clothing, especially where comparison and detail were a vital part of the story.

Starting with typed copy and photographic prints, we essentially went through all the phases of modern printing, akin to evolving from the Guttenberg bible to the digital age; when we acquired our first computer, it was a multi-user, with dumb terminals, and barely one MB of RAM, cost $25,000, and requiring a consultant to teach us how to operate and maintain it.

In addition, we had to learn how magazines are fulfilled, mailed and how to deal with the U.S. Postal Service to obtain and retain second class mailing privileges, in order to mail numbers of magazines at a more reasonable cost than retail mail. Whether having one or a thousand subscribers entailed all of the previous tasks, plus publishing on time and dealing with recurrent bills, despite too few subscribers to break even. The first issue of The Bead Journal had fewer than 300 subscribers. In addition, with publications where good photographs are paramount, I had to teach myself how to do macro photography in color and black and white, as well as invest in cameras, lenses and lighting that were almost beyond our means. Fortunately, Shima and my brother David, trained as an architect under Mies van der Rohe, who transitioned into film, and photographed almost on a professional level, such as the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, gave much good advice. In fact, I shot a lot of early Ornament photos with his medium format Bronica camera used for the Olympics. Later, David photographed and wrote for us, as he often traveled widely as a filmmaker. Other members of our extended families also were involved with Ornament, either working or writing for us or as models. My late sister Margaret, trained as a biochemist at Bryn Mawr College, who transitioned into a Chinese and English professor in the same department as Jill Biden, helped edit my writings, especially Collectible Beads. Along with my second wife Carolyn’s family, Margaret was a substantial emotional and financial supporter of Ornament.

SECOND FLOOR OF REAR OFFICE BUILDING ON LA CIENEGA BOULEVARD in the 1980s, with Jane Sugarman and Eran Fraenkel at front desk, along with visitor, who may have been our computer consultant. In upper right hand corner is a small part of the mezzanine, the office for our then designer, Sylvia Kennedy. *Photograph by Robert K. Liu/Ornament*.

PARROT PEARLS RIBBON NECKLACE shot with film, medium format with a 1958 Bronica, on Tufflock, for an article on the San Francisco based firm that made this jewelry (Benesh 1979). *Photograph by Robert K. Liu/Ornament.*

At that time, manuscripts were typed out, then sent to a typographer using a specialized and expensive machine to turn typing into phototype, which was then cut and pasted into a layout by a production designer. These in turn were shot and became negatives and plates for printing. All this meant hiring typographers, production artists, designers, and finding a press which could print good quality while keeping the print run small. All printing companies that printed magazines usually used web presses, which made hundreds of impressions each minute, so small press runs were often not economically feasible for them. We have been with our present Kentucky press for decades.

Because of the time demands of publishing, I had to leave UCLA in 1975. Carolyn’s family was very supportive, enabling us to move in 1979 to a duplex on La Cienega Boulevard from our rented storefront on Venice, where a gasoline pipeline explosion in June of 1976 essentially destroyed the surroundings of an intersection just hundreds of feet from us. Thinking that our place would also be engulfed, Carolyn and I ran into the street, she holding her cat, Nyoka, and me our cameras. While on Venice Boulevard, opposite the abandoned rail or trolley barn, Carolyn worked at the Museum of Science and Industry, Los Angeles, gaining experience in museum practices. Soon after moving to La Cienega, her parents paid for the removal of the rear garages, building in the former space a wonderful, modern two and a half story office building connected to the front Spanish duplex by a series of elevated walkways and balconies, in 1982. This enabled us to quickly reach the office by the ground or second floor, and it was easy to go to work at any hour of the day or night. The building had two spiral staircases and a balcony with widely spaced guardrails, but our son Patrick managed to survive going up and down these stairs from an early age, while visiting his parents on the first and second floors, and the design staff on the mezzanine, often on a day-long basis.

Being in Los Angeles, then the hub for many trade shows, as well as a destination for many dealers from around the world enabled us to get invaluable exposure to much of the world’s jewelry and some clothing. When trade shows were ongoing, we often had parties at our office, as the garden, decks, balconies, and walkways worked well as places for large numbers of people to mingle and talk, enjoying the good food Carolyn and her mother served. In fact, artists and members of the craft community such as museum staff like Lloyd Herman were often guests, staying upstairs in an apartment, with artists sometimes using my studio to make work. Having a workshop also enabled me to construct specialized metal armatures to hold jewelry so striking photographs could be taken in our studio (Liu 2014). Living and working on the 10th busiest street in Los Angeles meant having to sometimes wait until vibrations ceased from buses and trucks passing on the street in front, before continuing photography.

I think very early on we operated somewhat like a museum, in that each editor or consistent outside contributor covered a specific topic, some contemporary jewelry or contemporary clothing, others ethnographic or ancient jewelry, as well as a continuing interest in beads. Carolyn concentrated on contemporary jewelers and textile artists, while I mostly wrote about ancient and ethnic jewelry and material processes. Her writing, and that of Patrick frequently elicited praise for the beauty of their words. Many of those she wrote about became close friends, and Carolyn maintained a wide network in the craft community, on a constant basis.

ORNAMENT STAFF AND VISITORS AT OUR FORMER VISTA OFFICE IN 2011: *from left to right*: Jacquelyn Rice, Robert K. Liu, James F. Kirchner, Stephanie Morris, Jill A. DeDominicis, Carolyn L.E. Benesh, Patrick R. Benesh-Liu and Uosis Juodvalkis. Rice and Juodvalkis are visiting artists from Arizona, known as Gild the Lily, having driven here in their 24 foot Sprinter camper (Clark 2009). *Photograph by our UPS driver.*

We were fortunate to have the late Dr. Peter W. Schienerl join us, an Austrian anthropologist based in Cairo, providing coverage of the Middle East and introducing us to his European colleagues as additional writers. The late Peter Francis Jr. contributed regular Bead Reports from around the world, as he traveled often to undertake bead research. Very early on, Jamey D. Allen wrote on many aspects of beads and we remain in close contact after decades. The late Elizabeth J. Harris was an early and enthusiastic supporter of bead research, visiting us frequently and enjoying both Patrick and Nyoka.

Contemporary craftspeople were usually the main focus of our coverage, often Native Americans or artists of color (Benesh 1986, Benesh-Liu 2023), either by conducting interviews via telephone, going to their workplace or sometimes having them come to our office. If over the phone, their work was sent to us for photography, although some were able to supply images, especially textile artists who needed their clothing to be shown on models, although we shot a large number of jewelry and clothing in our studio, static or on models. Now, with the increased cost of shipping and travel, artists supply most of their illustrations. However, for events like conferences, shows and workshops, we often covered these in person. Because of the nature of crafts, frequently medium based, our coverage of metal, glass, polymer, and textiles was extensive. For example, as noted in my article on the comparison of contemporary versus 7th-12th century Islamic glass beads (Liu 2023), we started writing about glass beadmaking 45 years ago, culminating in 111 articles on this topic, with over 50 glass artists worldwide being profiled, sometimes more than once, as their work progressed, matured or innovated.

Early on in our publishing career, we realized we had to go to museums, galleries, craft and trade shows and businesses, to study their collections, exhibits and merchandise, in order to obtain the types of information we needed, often not available from printed sources. The Tucson gem shows were especially important to cover, because of the international importers who added variety. Throughout our publishing career, we have supported these types of enterprises, but with a primary emphasis on individual craft artists and stores carrying crafts, ethnographic and ancient merchandise. If craftspeople, store owners and importers were not able to make a viable living, there would not be craft in our lives, a loss to an enriching part of daily life.

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COVER PHOTOGRAPH of Patrick’s Spanish teacher, Dora Johnson, from Argentina, wearing Flora Book necklace(Benesh 1994). Photograph by Robert K. Liu/Ornament. NAGA ADORNMENT photographed for a catalog in an improvised studio in 2004, also for a cover feature in Ornament, (Liu 2004). Courtesy of the Harry L. and Tiala Marsosang Neufeld Collection. Photograph by Robert K. Liu/Ornament. COVER PHOTOGRAPH OF ANGELA DANIEL wearing anecklace by Collaboration, elements by Lucia Antonelli, Martin Kilmer and Laura Popenoe (Benesh 1983). Photograph by Robert K. Liu/Ornament.

From experience working with many museums, we realized that if there were no curators interested in a specific category of artifacts or the culture of a specific geographic area, it was not likely we would obtain much information about that artifact or culture, nor for them to be interested in accepting a donation of such artifacts. Throughout our publishing career, a number of collectors have asked us to help place their collections, so we try to be cognizant of which institutions to approach on their behalf. Finding an appropriate and secure home for collections of beads, jewelry or clothing continues to be difficult.

Our family members, including my late sister Margaret, have donated to a museum both Inuit artifacts and the formal qipao and shoes designed by my late mother Mary while she served as the wife of my diplomat father, Liu Wen-Tao, when he was minister to Austria and Germany, then under Hitler, and ambassador to Italy, under Mussolini. While in her late twenties-early thirties, despite never having worked, she had to manage the consulates and embassy of these countries, while learning their languages, a skill she retained for decades. My father’s career resulted in my late sister Margaret being born in Berlin and I in Rome.

When we started publishing in the 1970s, and even now, there were no really formal courses on the study of personal adornment, which is still mostly the case. As mentioned previously, studying collections in museums, having dealers and artists show us their work or merchandise, which we usually photographically documented or recorded, gave us an excellent and broad foundation of knowledge. Much more can be learned from actual objects, rather than just photographs. Early on, when we could afford it, we started to collect specimens for a study collection, much like biologists keep preserved examples of animals and plants to compare with new material they are studying. Liza Wataghani, an early importer of beads and jewelry from Africa and other areas of the world, was often the source of our study collections. She and I co-authored an article on Moroccan folk jewelry for African Arts magazine in 1975. For many years, she advertised on the back cover of the magazine, often employing her children as part of the image. Unique among dealers, she carried most of her inventory in her Volvo station wagon, going to her clients through much of the western United States, after she gave up her store in West Los Angeles.

Along with collecting beads and ethnographic jewelry for our study collections, Carolyn often supported artists with her articles, as well as buying their jewelry or clothing, in a manner that helped them materially.

We were exposed to the good and the bad, as well as fakes, which were often sent to us to appraise or identify. It is this type of informal education that often affords one to have wider knowledge than those employed in museums or galleries. Some curators and scholars actively seek out all examples of objects that they study, including those of dubious authenticity, or without good provenance. Others restrict themselves to only objects from authorized excavations. I firmly believe in exposure to as much as possible, though in recent years curtailed by age, the cost of travel and covid.

LAYOUT FOR THE COVER OF COLLECTIBLE BEADS, *Ornament*’s first book: bead strands were suspended from a wood strip out of frame, then individual beads, pendants and amulets were carefully placed in among the strands and foreground, to show the rich array of beads available in the Ornament study collection, with one strand from my brother David when he took a bus to Afghanistan (Liu 1995). *Photograph by* *Robert K. Liu/Ornament.*

As I gained experience in photographing personal adornment of all types, and trying out methods of presentation that provided more content and impact to the viewer, instead of just following the staid process of showing the top, end or lateral aspects of an object, certain people in the craft world offered us opportunities to photograph their collections, for articles, catalogs or books. While this type of photography is difficult and intense, especially if tight deadlines prevailed and was done in an improvised studio, it offered an opportunity to improve one’s photographic skills and to learn much about a subject, as well as forcing me to try new techniques in photographing beads and jewelry, often resulting in better and more striking images for publications. I am grateful to those who gave me such challenges, such as Penny Diamanti when she was active in the Bead Society of Greater Washington to photograph catalogs and A Bead Timeline, Marjorie Ransom when I photographed her book on Yemeni jewelry and clothing and the Bensons for letting me study and photograph their comprehensive collections of Tuareg jewelry (Lankton et al. 2003; Liu 1995, 2014, 2019; Ransom 2014).

Since much of the photography was done in-house during most of our tenure, we tried to show artists’ jewelry or clothing in the best and most interesting way, always making sure the art was the center of attraction, and not the model or setting. When jewelry or clothing was worn, we tried to not use professional models, instead often our staff, or a woman from the furniture business across from our former office, once a woman gardener for the cover, Patrick’s Spanish teacher or friends and family, to suggest the girl or woman next door. Occasionally, we did hire professional models, one of whom was my favorite, Christine Haberstroh, who was able to change her appearance to suit the material she wore, like the covers of Ornament 7.4 and 8.1 from 1984.

Sometimes the consequences of writing about our fields of coverage, beads, jewelry and clothing, can have unexpected results. Probably due to an article on early 20th century Venetian bead catalogs in 1975, I was asked to be an expert witness in an Arizona murder trial, by John Flynn, the lawyer who had argued the Miranda case before the Supreme Court. The crucial evidence was a necklace of mostly imported Venetian and African beads found by the police, who believed that such beads were unique, implicating the suspect. I knew that this was not true, both from personal experience with African imports, and since the catalog had stated that there were 5,000 different Venetian beads and overall, 100,000 European beads, all different.

With the sale of the Vista office building in 2016, and Carolyn’s passing due to breast cancer in 2020, the joyous period of our magazine experience has become more complicated. There is a lot of grief in having lost someone who was so integral to our collaboration, and the world these days seems filled with turmoil. But the strongest legacy of Ornament lives on, in every friendship we have found, in each artist whose work we have documented, and each bit of wisdom we have imparted.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Without the contributions of the late Carolyn L.E. Benesh, Patrick Benesh-Liu, our present and past staff, contributors and the members of the Benesh and Liu families, there would have been no Bead Journal and Ornament.

REFERENCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Allen, J. D. 1996 Bead Arts. Kiffa beads. Ornament 20 (1): 76-77.
Benesh, C. L.E. 1979 The Ceramic Jewelry of Parrot Pearls. Ornament 4 (2): 2-10.
—1983 Collaboration. Lucia Antonelli, Martin Kilmer, Laura Popenoe. Ornament 7 (2): 2-5.
—1986 Messages Through the Veil. Joyce Scott’s beaded jewelry. Ornament 10 (2): 32-33, 78.
—1994 Flora Book. Creative Spirit. Ornament 17 (3): 46-51.
Benesh-Liu, P. 2023 Undivided Ancestry. The Jewelry of Carl and Irene Clark. Ornament 44 (1): 36-43.
Clark, L. 2009 Jacquelyn Rice and Uosis Juodvalkis. A Margin of Uncertainty. Ornament 32 (3): 56-61.
—2022 Inside Out. Textile Artist Amy Nguyen. Ornament 43 (2): 48-53.
Francis, Jr., P. 1988 Nishapur: An Early Islamic City of Iran. Ornament 12 (2): 78-93.
Lankton, J. et al. 2003 A Bead Timeline. Volume I: Prehistory to 1200 CE. Washington, DC, The Bead Museum: 95 p.
Liu, R .K. 1995 Collectible Beads. A Universal Aesthetic. San Marcos, Ornament Inc.: 256 p.
—2004 Naga Ornaments. Tribal Symbolism and Variation. Ornament 27 (4): 44-49.
—2014 Photography of Personal Adornment. Photographic Techniques for Jewelry/Artwear Craftspeople, Researchers, Scholars and Museum/Gallery Staff. San Marcos, Ornament Inc: 160 p.
—2018 Tuareg Amulets and Crosses. Saharan/Sahelian Innovation and Aesthetics.. Ornament 40 (3): 58-63.
—2019 Tuareg Jewelry. Craft as Lifestyle. Ornament 41 (2): 46-53
—2024 Islamic Glass Beads revisited. A Global Trade. Ornament 44 (3): 26-33
— and L. Wataghani 1975 Moroccan Folk Jewelry. African Arts VIII (2): 28-35,80.
Panini, A. 2007 Middle Eastern and Venetian Glass Beads. Eighth to Twentieth Centuries. Milan, Skira editore S.p.A.: 311 p.
Ransom, M. 2014 Silver Treasures from the Land of Sheba. Cairo, AUC Press: 246 p.

Robert K. Liu is Coeditor of Ornament, for many years its in-house photographer, as well as covering ethnographic and ancient jewelry. His last book, The Photography of Personal Adornment, covers forty-plus years of shooting jewelry, clothing and events related to wearable art, both in and out of the Ornament studio. A lifetime avocation of scale modelmaking culminated in the publication in 2021 of a book on naval ship models of World War II, published in the United Kingdom. Chinese faience, composites and glass, both ancient and ethnographic, are among some of his research interests; in this issue, our 50th year, he delves into the history of The Bead Journal and Ornament, both in text and photographs.

Ornament at 50 Volume 44.4

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Ornament Magazine

Ornament at 50 Volume 44.4

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Mary Lee Hu Volume 44.4

Chunghi Choo Volume 44.4

Ornament Magazine