posted 10-04-2015 12:36 PM            

Bent, Cast & Forged: The Jewelry of Harry Bertoia

Bent, Cast & Forged
The Jewelry of Harry Bertoia
March 14, 2015 - November 29, 2015
Peggy DeSalle Gallery

In commemoration of the centennial of the artist’s birth, Bent, Cast & Forged: The Jewelry of Harry Bertoia is the first museum exhibition devoted to Harry Bertoia’s designs for jewelry. The former Cranbrook Academy of Art student and metal smithing instructor has received international acclaim for his metal furniture and sculpture, but his exploration of the medium originated in jewelry design while still a high school student in Detroit. Out of the hundreds of jewelry pieces attributed to Bertoia, the majority was produced during his years at Cranbrook, and this display of over thirty works offers an early glimpse of a creative vision that would crystallize as his career matured. Additionally, several early monotype prints are featured to illustrate how the artist harnessed the same intuitive and experimental approach to making in his planographic compositions. The objects in this exhibition highlight Bertoia’s investigations of form, dimension, and material on a concentrated and bankable scale—establishing him as a pioneer of the American Studio Jewelry movement and a master of elevating fashionable adornment to objets d’art.

The exhibition opened with an exclusive Art Members’ reception on March 13, from 6-8pm, featuring a lecture from Celia Bertoia, Harry Bertoia’s youngest daughter and director of the Harry Bertoia Foundation.

posted 05-30-2016 12:19 PM            

Atmosphere for Enjoyment is an installation of Bertoia sculptures exploring sound making. He called these sculptures sonambulents derived from the Latin roots for the words "sound" and "environment."

Exhibit runs from May 3 to September 25, 2016.

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About the Exhibition

Harry Bertoia’s (b. Italy 1915, d. United States 1978) career spanned just over thirty-five years. Known to many as the designer of the ”Diamond” chair still in production today by Knoll, Bertoia was also a prolific maker of prints, jewelry, and sculpture—both intimate and monumental—that grapple with properties of light, volume, and sound. He created much of his work from metal wire and rods; toward the middle of his career, he discovered that when the rods strike one another, they make lush, resonant sounds. By the early 1960s he was creating prototypes for his sounding or tonal sculptures, work that would eventually occupy the remaining years of his career.

These sounding or tonal sculptures would become collectively known as Sonambient, a combination of the Latin roots of the words “sound” and “environment.” In 1968 Bertoia began to set up the eighteenth century stone barn on his property in Pennsylvania, to house a selection of his sounding sculptures and gongs. There he recorded 360 (known) reel-to-reel tapes of the sculptures. The barn is still standing today, with ninety-one original sounding sculptures installed inside, as Bertoia had intended them: an environment for sound.

Atmosphere for Enjoyment: Harry Bertoia’s Environment for Sound is a modest attempt at capturing Bertoia’s intent for this vast body of work through sound, interactivity, performances, and a range of ephemera. With the Sonambient Barn as a central character in the history of this important body of work, the exhibition has been designed around approximating the experience of hearing these sculptures played in situ. Speaking of the sounding sculptures in a 1972 interview with Paul Cummings, Bertoia said, “We are confronted with this puzzle of … a sculptural element breaking the silence, it has a voice, hence we listen to it, maybe there is something to say.” Listen to the sounding sculptures as Bertoia installed and played them in his Pennsylvania barn, and let us know what you hear: #EnvironmentForSound.

Complementing the exhibition is a series of live performances in the gallery by contemporary sound artists Lizzi Bougatsos and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe that explores the legacy of the sounding sculptures as an important influence on sound, music and art today. Every final Friday throughout the run of the exhibition, MAD also invites musicians to create recordings with the installation of sounding sculptures in the gallery.

Atmosphere for Enjoyment: Harry Bertoia's Environment for Sound is organized by MAD’s William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator Shannon R. Stratton and Curatorial Assistant and Project Manager Sophia Merkin.

Support for Atmosphere for Enjoyment: Harry Bertoia’s Environment for Sound is generously provided by Nanette L. Laitman; Kay Bucksbaum; KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, the Official Airline of MAD; Joy and Allan Nachman; Kim and Al Eiber; Siegelson, New York; The Rotasa Foundation; Wright; and Barbara Fleischman.

MAD gratefully acknowledges the in-kind support of Knoll, Inc.

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