and their output, resulting in a growing number of museum collections and exhibitions in which jewelry pieces are displayed as autonomous works of art, separate from the human bodies they were traditionally made to adorn. This has led to a body of critical theory aimed at placing contemporary craft, including studio jewelry, in a broader context. The 2018 College Art Association Conference in Los Angeles featured an unprecedented number of panels devoted to craft, with titles such as “Craft and Resistance,” “Craft in an Anxiety Age,” and “Touch and Tooling.”2 The Facebook group Critical Craft Forum, launched in 2010 by curators Namita Gupta Wiggers and Elisabeth Agro, now boasts more than 10,500 members, and this fall Wiggers will launch a master of arts program in Craft Studies at Warren Wilson College, Asheville, NC, the first of its kind in the nation. This intensified scholarly and curatorial interest shows the inroads that finely crafted contemporary objects have made into the art-world canon. In an era when nearly all of our commodities are mass-produced—and when some of the world’s most celebrated fine artists pride themselves on erasing all evidence of their “hand” from their works—it also demonstrates a real hunger for one-of- a-kind works fashioned by skilled artisans. While many contemporary jewelry designers incorporate new technologies such as computer- aided design (CAD) into their process, as a group their work still remains fundamentally rooted in goldsmithing and metalworking techniques that can be traced back to medieval and even ancient times, and which are often passed down in the most traditional of ways—through specialized training programs, apprenticeships, and within families. Barbara Heinrich and Alan Revere both attended the prestigious Hochschule Pforzheim in Badem- Württemberg, Germany, which for a century and a half has been a mecca for aspiring metalsmiths and jewelry artists. Adam Neeley learned traditional goldsmithing at Le Arti Orafe in Florence, Italy. Ricardo Basta, Pascal Lacroix, Arman Sarkisyan, and Mark Schneider all hail from multigenerational families of jewelry makers. Gregoré Morin and Katey Brunini apprenticed to master jewelers on their way to establishing their own lines. Others, such as Jane Bohan, David Freda, Elizabeth Garvin, George Sawyer, and Linda MacNeil, came through art school programs in the United States and gravitated toward jewelry as their medium of choice. Alishan Halebian and Kent Raible, on the other hand, are largely self-taught. What unites these jewelry makers from so many different backgrounds, besides being among the best in the United States today, is that they are independent artists whose livelihood depends TRANSFORMATION DETAIL BY ALISHAN HALEBIAN