Purity Ring

Purity Ring
Art Smith
ca. 1975
Materials
14k-gold and rose quartz, edition of 200
Size
1 3/16 x 7/8 x 1/2 inches
Racine Art Museum, The Karen Johnson Boyd Collection
About the artwork.
Art Smith blended his love for music with artistic inspiration throughout his career as an art jeweler. Smith favored “biomorphic abstraction” with his organic somewhat free-flowing designs as seen in Purity Ring. He created jewelry with the human body in mind. Because of this emphasis on the wearer’s ease of movement, Smith took on projects such as creating stage jewelry for several Black dance companies and commissions from prominent musicians and singers.