Now in her eighth decade as a jewelry designer, Cooke is being honored with a retrospective exhibit at the Walters Art Museum, the first solo show of her career. “Betty Cooke: The Circle & the Line” includes more than 160 pieces of jewelry — miniature sculptures designed to be worn — that attest to the strikingly modern vision of the lifelong Baltimorean who created them.To get more news about jewelry designer near me, you can visit jewelryhunt.net official website.
Cooke’s work has been included in group shows in museums since 1948, including in a 2019 exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
But in Baltimore, Cooke is known less as an artist than as the founder of The Store Ltd. in Cross Keys, where she can be found six days a week creating unique pieces of handmade jewelry that well-heeled patrons clamor to buy.
Walters Director Julia Marciari-Alexander describes Cooke, 97, as “a singular genius” and “one of the great artist-entrepreneurs of the 20th and 21st centuries.” She’s thrilled that her museum is the first to give Cooke the respect she deserves.If Betty had lived in another city, I believe she would have gotten a great deal more recognition,” said Fred Lazarus IV, former president of Maryland Institute College of Art, Cooke’s alma mater. “In Baltimore, we’re better at denigrating what we have rather than feeling proud of it. If we pound our own chest, it’s usually because we’re beating ourselves up.
“Betty sometimes says: ‘I bet if I did my work in sculptural form, people would take notice.’”If Cooke flew under the radar, it’s not because she lacks confidence. She’s always known she has vision.
Cooke’s style is streamlined and deceptively simple. Like other artists associated with the midcentury modern design movement, she breaks complicated objects down to their building blocks. The exhibit’s title stems from two of the artist’s lifelong preoccupations.
“When I taught, we used to study what could be done with one straight line,” Cooke says in the exhibit catalog. “I can spend years with a circle.”A gold necklace in the exhibit resembling a cluster of branches sends off twig-like shoots. From three twigs swell pearls as luminescent as dewdrops. A silver pin shaped like a boomerang suggests a flying bird.
In another gallery, a gold and silver necklace with silver bars and cascades of stars recalls the American flag.
“Her work is very clean. You rarely see solder lines,” said Jo Briggs, the Walters’ assistant curator of 18th- and 19th-century art, who co-curated the show, which includes pieces Cooke crafted 75 years ago that Briggs said appear utterly contemporary today.Her mother was a singer before her marriage and, later, a teacher. Her father worked as a clerk for the B&O Railroad, but painting was his passion.
On weekends he would head to Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park with his painting supplies, accompanied by his only daughter, the youngest of his three children. Ten-year-old Betty would set up her easel alongside her father’s. During those sessions, she encountered the physical world of birds, planets and stars that permeates her work today.