A new exhibition highlighting the rich and diverse silver jewelry traditions of the Thar Desert region of India is coming to the Fowler Museum at University of California.
Featuring more than 160 works of art, “Enduring Splendor: Jewelry of India’s Thar Desert” opens Feb. 19 and closes June 18. “Enduring Splendor” invites visitors to consider these traditions against the background of a 5,000-year history of jewellery making across the vast Indian subcontinent. Drawing on recent field research carried out in the city of Jaisalmer, a thriving center of contemporary jewellery production, the exhibition is one of the very few to explore for the first time the lives and work of four sonis (silversmiths or goldsmiths). This presentation emphasizes the symbiotic relationships that exist between jewellery and society, artist and jewellery, and artist and society.
These exemplary types — including earrings, anklets, bracelets, and necklaces — are borrowed from the Ronald and Maxine Linde Collection, one of the most comprehensive collections of Indian jewelry in the world.
To this end, the Fowler Museum commissioned new silver works from the four contemporary smiths, who execute and transform traditional designs and techniques of manufacture in distinctive ways. Exhibition highlights include these newly commissioned objects, contextualized by a survey of 19th- and 20th-century jewelry types still worn by rural men and women from Rajasthan and Gujarat.
