Morris Graves Museum “Junque Arte”

I recoil slightly at the term Junk Art, as I don’t view my jewelry as junk at all. Our local museum, the Morris Graves Museum of Art has an annual Junque Arte exhibit, a juried show of objects made from reused materials. I entered two pieces and both were accepted.

Since we traveled to Italy in 2017, I’ve been making jewelry from sea glass, pieces we’ve collected along different shores. It gives me something to do with my finds other than pile them up or fill a lamp base. Initially, though, I began putting things together out of household scraps, and my first necklace was made of prosecco caps and images cut from ticket stubs and guides from the museums we visited in Rome. The chain came from a broken light pull. I entered that necklace in the exhibit, calling it “Roman Holiday.”

The second piece I entered was my Earthquake parure. I used pieces of my daughter’s vintage Japanese porcelain cups and saucers that broke during the December 2022 earthquake in Rio Dell, CA set in recycled copper, to make a pendant necklace, a bracelet, and earrings. A parure is a set of jewelry meant to be worn together. A century ago, a parure was likely to include a tiara, a necklace, a bracelet, a brooch, or a pair of dress clips, and earrings presented in an elaborate, custom-fitted box.

In the spirit of a true parure, but using recycled or used materials, I found a Tupperware with three sections and lined it with cloth from an old skirt that I had cut up.

I went to the museum when the exhibit opened to see the other pieces. They were delightful. People put a lot of work into their ideas and the results were creative, interesting, and full of whimsy. The exhibit may have been sponsored by our waste disposal service, Recology, but the artwork was not trashy at all.

Clockwise from upper left: Ballcock, Sewing Fairy, Belly of the Beast, Use Your Words, (no title).

The best piece of all was a thought-provoking sculpture, Blinde Injustice. I spoke to the artist who explained that her piece comes from real life. She doesn’t believe in suppressing any book, and she has a Little Library box in front of her house that has been set on fire on three different occasions by people who believe her book sharing is dangerous. “When they banned Charlotte’s Web because the animals could talk,” she said, “I knew I had to put it in my library.” Thousands of books we all read as children and students have been banned in the US, for reasons that are often implausible. For me, this piece was Best in Show by a long stretch, a reminder that art can make us think, and perhaps, act.