WINIFRED MASON B. 1912
Winifred Mason Chenet was born in Brooklyn and graduated from New York University in 1936. She began teaching classes at the Children’s Aid Society in Harlem, as well as making copper jewelry in her studio at home in her spare time. She made her first piece of jewelry in 1940 – a pendant in bronze, copper, and silver. It became clear quite soon that her artistry was going to be in high demand. Even as orders increased, she tried to ensure that each piece was unique, unless a customer requested matched pieces. Mason-Chenet believed that jewelry should be complimentary to the specific individual and conform to the body of the wearer. She created her own tools in order to hand craft each piece in this way. By 1943, she began to receive orders from exclusive department stores and as demand increased, she was forced to enlist help, including a young Art Smith. Her work was featured in many exhibitions, and her clientele had grown to include such luminaries as Billie Holiday, who was photographed in Ebony, (1946) wearing Mason’s jewelry. The article, titled, “Copper Christmas”, was a feature story on Mason and her work. The caption to one photo reads, “many of her designs are drawn from Abstraction and West Indies patterns.” In fact, in 1945, Mason was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship and used the funds to travel to the West Indies “to gather folk material and basic art patterns used by the West Indians and to express these feelings in jewelry.” While her modernistic, abstract pieces always had a Caribbean influence, when she returned, newly married, she opened a new store called the Haitian Bazaar. She debuted a new line of jewelry called Vodou d’Haiti which featured symbols she had observed in her travels. She began signing the pieces “Chenet” when the line was sold to Bloomingdale’s New York. She later returned with her husband, Jean, to Haiti and together they opened a jewelry store there. In 1963, he was murdered by the Tonton Macoute, and Mason-Chenet was forced into hiding, managing to return to the United States with the help of the embassy. She lived a quiet life until her death.
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