Then head into the Natural History Museum to find The Art of the Jewel: the Crevoshay Collection — a kaleidoscopically vibrant feast for the eyes which transforms raw minerals to beautiful works of art.
“The museums come for me personally. It’s my fate,” she describes candidly from her New Mexico home. Crevoshay’s 30-year profession was punctuated with museum exhibitions, four of which are one-woman shows.
Crevoshay credits her love of gemstones for her admiration of light and color from years of painting. She studied fine arts however, in 1978 spent years in India, a career-changing movement that caused her change in mediums. In awe of this beautiful opulence of Indian jewellery, she traded her canvas to get prized materials, but approached it using the exact same artist’s eye. “I’m painting with the concrete light of this mineral. Gemstones will be the light of the planet. It is concrete, it’s portable and it is glorious,” states Crevoshay.
However, just what are these gems performing at a natural history museum where you’d be more inclined to locate fossils or child-friendly Paper exhibits? Over years my work has concentrated on fauna and flora, and I wish to keep these specimens for eternity — to make a time capsule”
It’s a bridge which people will cross as they respect the puzzlingly complicated details of a blossom or fire flower whilst innately ingesting within an appreciation for gemology and geology — and perhaps even a miracle for gem-carving. A particular emphasis is put on the collection of diamonds coming from the USA, such as Californian and Maine tourmalines and Montana sapphires, and their astonishing transformation at the hands of skilled American rock carvers.
For years, gem collectors and people in the know have admired Crevoshay’s job not just for its own sensitive artistry but its capacity to emphasise miracle. Her stones forge a connection between life and earth together with the lightest of touches.
Crevoshay has ever seen jewellery as an art form:”In my opinion I wish to announce jewelry as a good art area, not simply a craft,” says Crevoshay. And museum curators have taken notice. Her very first museum commission was in 2007 when the Smithsonian requested her to make a gem from a contribution of Montana sapphires, which caused the Conchita butterfly brooch that’s now permanently on display in Washington. Her 2013 exhibition entitled’Garden of Light’ in the Carnegie Museum at Pittsburgh was next, followed with a’Beyond Color’ group made to celebrate the introduction of this jewellery wing in Kentucky’s Headley Whitney Museum.
The beauty of these stones not merely reminds us of the frailty of our obligation to conserve it, but all life evolved in the very same elements. If this appears to be a tall order, a trip to this new spin on mineral miracles might only change your mind.
