Marjorie Schick (1941-2017) was an American studio jeweller and educator whose work sits at the boundary between jewellery and sculpture. Over a career of more than fifty years she produced wearable objects that radiated outward from the body in painted wood and papier-mâché, in many cases far exceeding the scale of conventional jewellery, and that helped establish the United States as a serious centre of conceptual studio jewellery alongside Europe.

Schick was born in Taylorville, Illinois, and received her undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MFA from Indiana University, Bloomington, where she studied under Alma Eikerman, herself a pivotal figure in postwar American metalsmithing. Eikerman's emphasis on form and on the maker's relationship to the body informed Schick's later practice. She joined the faculty at Pittsburg State University in Kansas in 1967 and taught there for the remainder of her career.

Sculptural jewellery

Schick's mature work, which began to mature in the late 1970s and 1980s, departs decisively from precious metal in favour of painted wood, dowels, and laminated paper construction. The results are intensely coloured, geometric assemblages worn around the neck, on the head, or extending from the shoulders, often comprising long radiating spokes that occupy the space around the wearer rather than sitting on it. She referred to several of these works as "body sculpture" or "performance jewellery," and their relationship to dance, performance art, and the legacy of Bauhaus stage design is explicit.

Painting was as central to the work as construction. Schick treated each surface as a small canvas, applying acrylic colour in flat, hard-edged geometric patterns reminiscent of Constructivist and De Stijl sources. The choice of light materials kept the pieces wearable, despite their dramatic size, and allowed the jewellery to be as much a graphic event as a sculptural one.

Influence and recognition

Schick was a recipient of the Master of the Medium award from the Smithsonian's James Renwick Alliance and received the Society of North American Goldsmiths' Lifetime Achievement award. Her work is held in the permanent collections of major institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Mint Museum and the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto.

For the field, Schick demonstrated that an American maker working from a regional university could enter the international conversation that surrounded the Schmuck exhibitions in Munich and the Dutch and German conceptual jewellery of the 1980s and 1990s. Her insistence on colour and on the scale of the body extended that conversation in a distinctly American direction.

Reading the work

For trade and collectors, Schick's pieces are documented through monographs and exhibition catalogues, including the 2007 retrospective publication Sticks and Stones, Bones and Such, which remains the most useful printed source. Authentication is supported by the careful records held by Pittsburg State University and by her estate.