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Small
Wonders BY DIANA F. PARDUE | CHIEF CURATOR
The exhibition Small Wonders provides the opportunity to see a range of intricately made small-format works including jewelry (rings, brooches, earrings and buckles) and specialty items such as silver seed pots, fetishes or stone carvings, and silver items in miniature. Each is shaped in silver, gold or from a variety of gemstones, and all are from the Heard Museum’s permanent collection. Some examples of the little treasures in the exhibition are the miniatures fabricated in silver. Some of these were made by jeweler Shawn Bluejacket (Shawnee), whose jewelry is known for its complexity of design and the myriad stones she adds to her silver or gold creations. Some 20 years ago, Bluejacket was looking at the spare
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EARTHSONG
metal parts that remained after she made her signature earrings, necklaces and brooches, and she wanted to find a way to use them. She got the idea to make little houses on stilts. She began to fabricate the small houses, as well as furniture, flowerpots and other miniature shapes, out of her scrap silver. When completed, the miniatures also function as small boxes or containers. Bluejacket found that making the miniatures offered a respite from the other jewelry items she fabricated and allowed her to explore working creatively in metal but in a different format. One feels much like Alice in Wonderland when surveying these tiny works. ABOVE: Denise Wallace (Sugpiaq/Alutiiq), b. 1957, Yup’ik Amikuk mask, 2001. Fossilized ivory, silver, 14K gold. Bequest of Dr. E. Daniel Albrecht, 4837-35.
