Zero Karat: Jewelry in Non-Precious Materials from the Collection of the Museum of Arts & Design

May 14 – September 11, 2005

This exhibition explored the development of the studio art jewelry movement through a group of nearly eighty works. The exhibition featured works from the Donna Schneier Collection, which Schneier donated to the Museum of Arts and Design in 1997. The artists included in Zero Karat are internationally renowned for taking a new approach to jewelry in the late 1960s that focused on the intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic impact of non-precious and alternative materials such as firecrackers, rubber, and aluminum. This generation of artists began to bridge the gap between jewelry and the mainstream art movements: sculpture, performance, and assemblage.