Reception: Friday, August 20, 2010, 5:30 - 7:30pm

LewAllen Galleries is pleased to present its upcoming exhibition, Carolyn Morris Bach: Talismans, on view August 6–22, 2010, at LewAllen Galleries’s downtown venue. Although opening August 6th, the show’s reception will take place on Friday, August 20, from 5:30 to 7:30pm.

Carolyn Morris Bach is widely regarded as one of today’s finest art jewelers. Living on 70 rural acres in southern New England, and working in a studio surrounded pastures and forests profoundly affected by the cycles of the seasons, she is intimately connected to the natural environment. This experience finds visual expression in the narrative imagery of her jewelry—exquisitely wrought of 18 and 22 karat gold, fine silver and copper, and often accented with pearls or gemstones.

Her signature motif, tiny creatures with solemn or half-smiling, ovoid or moon-shaped faces carved from ivory, seem suffused with the totemic significance of visual metaphors for the powers of the sun, moon, wind, rain, stones, plants, and animals. At once elegant and enigmatic, her work attests to the enduring influence of the mythic and allegorical within contemporary art. An exhibition of her most recent jewelry, Talismans honors numerous anecdotes relating her art’s abilities to heal and protect its wearers.

Carolyn Morris Bach holds a BFA in Jewelry and Metalsmithing from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her art is included within numerous public collections, among them the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, and the Racine Art Museum. In addition to lapidary and other specialty journals, her work has appeared in the pages of Elle, Vogue, Bazaar, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Metropolitan Home, and numerous other lifestyle publications. Bach’s jewelry has been recognized with awards of merit from the Smithsonian Institution, the American Craft Museum, and by a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Most recently, a Carolyn Morris Bach brooch was included in the book by Madeline Albright, Read My Pins: Stories from a Diplomat’s Jewel Box.