Harriete Estel Berman
artist profile |
 photo by Barbara Kossey |
Vibrant color combined with social awareness — Harriete Estel Berman's jewelry makes strong political and visual statements. Her work is found in museums around the world, including the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery. Berman also coauthors "The Professional Guidelines" for the Society of North American Goldsmiths (snagmetalsmith.com).
You describe the materials you use as "post-consumer material diverted from a destiny as trash." Essentially, recycled material.
I was recycling crazy as early as 1980, when there was no curbside recycling. When I started using tin cans, it was inspired by my recycling efforts — and I've always been attracted to the advertising on the exterior.
People often look at my work and think I painted it. I'll explain that I made it out of recycled tin, and they'll say, "But then you painted it, right?" They really don't get that it used to be trash. There's something really amazing about people looking at a piece that they were about to throw away and realizing that there's not only an inherent beauty but that they could reuse it. How do you get people to be aware of how much they throw away?
For a while, AOL was sending out CDs in tin boxes. It was so wasteful — it's hard to imagine that AOL thought that it was worth sending a CD to everyone in a tin box, for free.
The effort that has gone into the graphic design on those boxes is striking. The boxes always have some message — NEW, BETTER, FASTER, IMPROVED! That's what I like to capture — the values of our society.
Are you inspired by the tin to make the piece, or do you look for tins to complete a particular piece?
It goes both ways. Being inspired by the color or the pattern of the tin — that's more likely to happen with the jewelry. Five or six years ago, I saw Penguin caffeinated mints in a small tin. I contacted the company and said, "If you have any damaged cans, can I have them?" They sent me 188 cans — huge boxes of stale mints. I sent them photos of the work I made and the publicity I got from the work, and they sent me seven more boxes. I was using just the tops, with the logo and the black-and-white diagonal stripes; then I realized that the bottoms have the bar code on them.
Much of your work deals with consumer culture.
It's a recurring theme. So much of our identity is through the products we consume. Making jewelry out of products is a direct reference to that.
That connection between jewelry and identity — it's a modern twist on the traditional role of jewelry.
Jewelry has served to identify people ever since its inception — to identify social class, or position in society. People don't really think about that much. They wear their wedding ring, and they forget the role that piece of jewelry is playing in creating an identity for them. But it has shifted. There's a recent line of jewelry put out by Tiffany where the hallmark is oversized. Instead of this being an ID bracelet, like people used to wear, it has the oversized Tiffany hallmark. People aren't wearing their own names anymore, their own identities. People create identities through what they buy.
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