Many artists referred to as “ahead of their time” weren’t received well during their life. But the jewelry of now-89-year-old Antonio Pineda, progressive as it was, was a novelty that people embraced soon after its creation.
Pineda’s extraordinary jewelry, flatware and sculpture will be on display in the Fowler Museum’s “Silver Seduction” exhibit, running through March 15. The exhibition will feature a range of his work from the 1930s through the 1970s, starting with work of various silversmiths in Pineda’s hometown of Taxco, Mexico.
Cindy Tietze, a 30-year collector of Pineda’s work who donated jewelry for the exhibit, explained the originality and boldness of his artistry.
“During the time that Pineda started doing jewelry, the trend was more ethnic, and if you look at his pieces, you’ll see that they’re very modern looking. And this was in the late ’40s and early ’50s, before that was what other people were doing,” Tietze said.
The first part of the exhibition looks at the earliest traditions in Taxco, focusing not only on Pineda but also on other smiths that were apprenticing and experimenting with silver at the time.
“Looking at some of the earliest pieces, you can really see that it was a very nascent tradition that was growing in Taxco,” said Betsy Quick, Fowler’s Director of Education and head of the curatorial team for this exhibit.
Taxco itself was a center of innovation attracting many artists and writers, including Frida Kahlo, Joseph Conrad, Diego Rivera and William Faulkner.
“It was very much a place of enormous conversation and dialogue and exchange of ideas, revolutionary ideas,” Quick said.
This backdrop certainly had a hand in fostering Pineda’s innovations. Pineda began his work in silver by apprenticing with William Spratling, an American-born, Taxco-based designer acknowledged for starting the contemporary Taxco silver movement.
While it must have been helpful to have such an influential designer as a mentor, it made it difficult for Pineda when he went out on his own to establish himself separately from Spratling.
“He talks about the struggle it was to find his own style and his own voice and to not be in the shadow of William Spratling,” Quick said. “You see very much as you go through the exhibition that he really did establish his own style; he was very bold and very experimental.”
In some ways he even surpassed his mentor, considering his background, not only in design, but in silversmithing as well.
“In contrast to his mentor Spratling, Pineda was also a silversmith. He was not just a designer and artist,” Quick explained. “He really had a sense of the possibility of the metal, an enormous respect for that material and the ways it could be worked to great effect.”
Pineda’s works of jewelry are known not only for their beauty, but for the way they fit and feel on the skin. Tietze’s husband, Stuart Hodosh ““ who, along with Tietze, now owns an extensive collection of Pineda’s work and donated to the exhibit ““ was first drawn to the jewelry because of its striking beauty and comfort.
“We saw a bracelet of his and it was a fantastic design, and a heavy piece of silver jewelry. My wife put it on and it just felt like velvet on her wrist and that was how we first got acquainted with him,” Hodosh said.
But Hodosh believes that Pineda’s work is more than just great jewelry.
“It’s no different than to say that Picasso is a painter. Yes, he uses paint, but the end product that he puts out is something else. It’s the same thing with the silver, Pineda uses silver but the end product that he puts out is unlike anything else, and it’s phenomenal.”