Opening Reception: Prints from the Age of Rodin and Sculptured Adornment: The Jewelry of David Hayes

The Opening Reception for Prints from the Age of Rodin and Sculptured Adornment: The Jewelry of David Hayes is on Thursday, October 3rd, from 6 - 7:30 p.m. in the museum's Bellarmine Hall Galleries and Great Hall. The exhibition and reception are free and open to the public. Light snacks and refreshments will be provided.

Prints from the Age of Rodin (October 4 - December 21, 2019) features lithographs and etchings by Rodin’s contemporaries, ranging from views of the urban environment of Paris, to portraits of artists, writers, and thinkers, to theater playbills and advertisements. Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, as well as selected items on loan from the Jundt Art Museum of Gonzaga University, the exhibition includes works by Berthe Morisot, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, and Félix Vallotton that illuminate the rich cultural atmosphere of Paris during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The exhibition Sculptured Adornment: The Jewelry of David Hayes (October 4 - December 21, 2019) focuses on the work of a sculptor who branched into jewelry-making during the 1950s. The pieces of jewelry on view primarily served as gifts for Hayes’ family members and friends, and represent the loving relationships he had with them. This exhibition, which opened at the Georgia Museum of Art in May 2019, presents these personal ornaments to the public for the first time.

Hayes was born in 1931 and grew up in Connecticut during the Depression and the Second World War. He left New England for college in the Midwest, earning a bachelor’s degree in art from Notre Dame in 1953 and a master’s in 1955 from Indiana University. Hayes won a Fulbright scholarship and subsequently spent eight years in France. Along the way, he met several artists who influenced his skills and aesthetics, including the abstract sculptors David Smith and Alexander Calder. Hayes died in Coventry, CT in 2013.

Hayes' sculptures combined seemingly organic shapes with industrial materials, often on a monumental scale. His jewelry, in contrast, is small and delicate. This intimate exhibition includes approximately 40 brooches and pendants. Most of the brooches do not have clasps, leaving flexibility for the wearer to determine how to attach them to clothing. The hammered surfaces of these talisman-like objects brings the strength and mystery of iron-shaping into the 20th century. Both naturalistic and abstracted elements in the pieces on view suggest an otherworldly aesthetic.

Image (left): Alphones Legros, Cover of L’Estampe Moderne, 1898, Lithograph, Gift of James Reed

Image (right): David Hayes Jewelry