#JewelryGeography Greenwich Village Virtual Walking Tour with Toni Greenbaum

Throughout its history, New York City is constantly reinventing itself as the epicenter of everything – art, theater, music, fashion, food, finance and of course, jewelry. And though we’re wondering how NYC will reinvent itself once again in a post-pandemic world – the energy of its streets, the diversity of its neighborhoods, the strength of its communities is a testament to NYC’s ability to get through hard times and be better than ever. Join us as we go “back in time” and look at the city, through the lens of jewelry, and stroll its streets in other eras. Sometimes it takes only one new shop or one new artist to shift a neighborhood in a new direction…

We travelled first to 1930s-1970s Greenwich Village, a mecca for studios and shops specializing in handmade jewelry – what we now term “modernist”. In association with her book Sam Kramer: Jeweler on the Edge, jewelry historian Toni Greenbaum took us on a Virtual Walking Tour of the former sites of several iconic Greenwich Village jewelry establishments, including Sam Kramer, Art Smith, Francisco Rebajes, Winifred Mason, Paul Lobel, Bill Tendler, and Ed Wiener. We visited these extraordinary and influential jewelers through archival photos of The Village along with images of the makers, their captivating works, and current photos of the store locations.

Toni Greenbaum is a New York-based art historian specializing in twentieth and twenty-first century jewelry and metalwork. She wrote Messengers of Modernism: American Studio Jewelry 1940-1960, along with numerous book chapters, exhibition catalogues, and essays for arts publications, including an essay on Sam Kramer and contemporary jeweler Karl Fritsch for Jewelry Stories: Highlights from the Collection 1947-2019, to be published by the Museum of Arts and Design and Arnoldsche in Fall 2020. Greenbaum has lectured internationally and has worked on exhibitions for several museums. She is a Professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, where she teaches a course in Theory and Criticism of Contemporary Jewelry.