“The Art of Transformation: The Jewelry of Mark Schneider” opened on Saturday, November 7 at the Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art in Oak Brook, Illinois, and runs through April 4, 2027. The exhibition brings together 40 one-of-a-kind pieces by Mark Schneider, guest curated by Elyse Zorn Karlin, and it is organised around the way Schneider actually works — which is the reverse of the order most people assume.
Designed Around the Stone
Most jewellers, the museum’s curator notes, design a piece of jewellery first and then search for stones to mount into the design. Schneider works the other way. He finds stones he thinks are beautiful, interesting, or sometimes rare, and designs the piece around them, working with gem cutters and lapidaries who often use unusual faceting techniques. His designs, in the curator’s image, complement the stones as a frame does a painting. The foreword to the book published on his jewellery puts the same method in his own terms: he rarely starts from a design and looks for a gemstone to fit it; he finds the gemstone and waits for it to speak to him — sometimes at once, sometimes after the stone has sat in his collection for ten or twenty years.
That patience has a record behind it. Schneider has won 68 prestigious jewellery industry awards since he began his career as a jewellery designer, having come to design from his family’s retail jewellery business. He grew up in that business, and in 1981 he turned from selling jewellery to designing his own. The pieces in the exhibition are grouped the way his interests run: water, flora and fauna, architectonic, furniture-influenced, and the cosmos. Within those groups the range runs, in the museum’s description, from the beautifully refined to the whimsical.
A Standing Assignment
Part of that range comes from a standing assignment. In addition to the award-winning pieces, the exhibition includes 22 pieces Schneider designed for the American Jewelry Design Council Projects. The Council is an invitation-only group of which he is a member; it selects a theme each year, and the members interpret that theme in their own way. Those pieces, the museum notes, show his playful nature — a different side of the work from the award pieces, and one that exists because a theme was imposed from outside rather than drawn out of a stone.
A Museum of the Lapidary Arts
The setting is a museum of the lapidary arts — the cutting, polishing and engraving of stone — founded in Elmhurst, Illinois, in 1962 and moved to Oak Brook in 2019. It is a fitting room for this particular subject, because the transformation in the exhibition’s title happens before the jewellery begins: a stone is found, cut in an unusual way, and only then given a design that answers it. On opening day, Schneider spoke at the museum about the inspiration for his designs.
A retrospective usually reads as a summary: the work, finished, in cases. This one is also a record of a method. Forty pieces designed around their stones carry the evidence of that order of work in every setting — the metal was made to answer the stone, not the stone cut down to answer the metal. That is the transformation the title names, and it is visible piece by piece.
— Tom