Lois Boardman – Artwork Jewellery Discussion board

Lois Boardman entered eternity in Pasadena, CA, on April 21, 2025. There’s little doubt that she deliberate to accompany Pope Francis, sporting her Gold Nostril, forged by Gerd Rothmann, and adorned by Nancy Worden’s necklace titled Gilding the Previous. Just like the dinner gatherings of historic individuals in Van Loon’s Lives, her presence would have enticed people like Emily Dickinson, Madame Curie, and Queen Elizabeth into the Boardman world of ornamentation.

Lois was born to oldsters Ernie Meyer and Gertrude Degginger on August 18, 1931, in Chicago, IL. In 1953, whereas finding out anthropology in Lausanne, Switzerland, she met Robert Boardman, a medical pupil (finally recognized to all as Dr. Bob). They married in Lausanne shortly afterwards on June 3, 1953, and remained a loyal couple for 66 years till Bob’s demise in 2019 in South Pasadena, the place they’d been completely settled since 1958 with their daughter and son, Andrue and Peter.

Inside a brief time period, Lois grew to become a part of a bunch of inventive ladies concerned within the California Design Motion. Whereas serving as Director of Exhibitions with Eudorah Moore, she helped discovered the Pasadena Artwork Alliance. I bear in mind over twenty years in the past Lois collating these archives, which had been saved in her storage, packing them in her automotive, and driving them north to an official repository in Oakland, CA.

A passionate collector of ceramics and folks artwork, Lois’s urge for food and curiosity in jewellery was born after we met as members of the Nationwide Crafts Planning Challenge process power launched by Eudorah Moore in 1980 below the auspices of the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts. Lois and I had been assigned as roommates—the East and West had been introduced collectively. I adorned myself day by day with Skoogfors, Lechtzin, Paley, and Moty—a visible invitation for inquiries, as Lois launched me to Southern California ceramicists Ralph Bacerra, Jun Kaneko, Mineo Mizuno, and Peter Shire.

After touring collectively for one yr, we had bonded. Visually and aesthetically seduced by my day by day ornamentation, Lois knowledgeable me that she needed to create a set of up to date jewellery. To start with, lengthy earlier than fax machines, I used to be Lois’s mentor and launched her to artists Gijs Bakker, Claus Bury, Stanley Lechtzin, Bruno Martinazzi, Albert Paley, Wendy Ramshaw, Bernhard Schobinger, and Olaf Skoogfors by way of telegrams and handwritten notes. In 1984, after frequent phone conversations, typed invoices started to file the formation of the Boardman Assortment. Faxes would quickly substitute the verbal dialogue. Written passages about artists and drawings of objects started to flood loose-leaf pages. A singular change was below method. A peripatetic traveler, Lois despatched me postcards from Canada, Bhutan, China, Jordan, and Turkey. Typically photographs appeared of Lois sporting ethnic jewellery she had clearly acquired from an encounter with an indigenous particular person. I despatched FedEx packages with jewels to South Pasadena for approval or return.

A decade later, the faxes ebbed and e mail messages—shorter, extra direct, and nearly impersonal—dominated our communications. Lois would ask, “What have you ever seen recently that has caught your eye?” The web had change into Lois’s mentor and playmate, and sated her curiosity with immediate photographs and knowledge from world wide. She said, “I slowly discovered and developed my eye… I purchased items solely on the idea of how they appeared to me ‘on-line.’ It was nice to wander the world in the hunt for objects. From the Western Hemisphere, Europe to Australia to Thailand, I let my fingers do the strolling.”[i]

In the course of the Nineteen Nineties, the skilled umbilical wire was actually being severed. New applied sciences had been permitting Lois to pursue her curiosity in jewellery, and she or he started to hunt info from numerous sources. She had graduated “school,” earned her visible collector’s “grasp’s diploma,” and now ventured forth independently, making daring decisions as her private aesthetic expanded. She solid her personal relationships with nationwide and worldwide galleries—Gallery Funaki in Melbourne; Gallery S.O. in London; Gallery Spektrum in Munich; Ornamentum Gallery in Hudson, New York; Sienna Gallery in Lenox, Massachusetts; Gallery Marzee in Nijmegen, the Netherlands; Fingers Up to date Jewelry in Auckland—typically secretly and sometimes with decisions that had been alien to my aesthetic. The gathering, whereas rooted in my steering, more and more started to replicate Lois Boardman herself.

Lois Boardman’s portrait for Breon O’Casey’s seventieth birthday in 1998 reveals a collector who shares my aesthetic sporting a traditional silver necklace. Years later, a 2015 portrait by Miriam Kunzli for Artwork Aurea captures Lois demonstrating the increasing scope of her impartial imaginative and prescient in a neckpiece by Afke Golsteijn made from taxidermied parakeet wings mounted on material.

A 34-year epistolary friendship developed into one among lengthy phone calls and conferences in New York, Pasadena, Philadelphia, Dublin, Amsterdam, and Munich. Ardour for the sector and an change of great dialogue combined with laughter strengthened each our shared and separate paths within the pursuit of labor. In Lois’s personal phrases, handwritten to me in a letter from January 30, 1995:

Why I began shopping for into adornment and metals…

 1st I had been round crafts for a few years via the Pasadena Museum exhibition program, California Design—

 2nd I used to be thrown right into a state of affairs the place I used to be Helen Drutt’s roommate for a yr, due to the federal authorities—

 third, or perhaps 1st, I’m a lady & like to adorn, despite the fact that I don’t look the half—a closet adorner—

 4th Reside in earthquake nation—

 fifth Have granddaughters and daughters that might get pleasure from these objects as nicely, give them curiosity—because it gave me an curiosity—exterior of the conventional humdrum—

 sixth Not the least—love the fabric.

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Lois and Bob’s choice to provide the gathering to Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork (LACMA) in 2013 would come from their nice sense of philanthropy and love of the crafts. It might even be impressed by the present’s potential to strengthen the significance of the sector, offering the artists with larger visibility. In 2016 LACMA exhibited and printed the mature assortment below the title Past Bling.

 Donations in her identify will be made to the Lois Boardman Endowed Scholarship on the Otis School of Artwork and Design, Los Angeles, CA. Mary Coquillard, an in depth good friend of Lois, said that her demise was, certainly, “the tip of an period.”

This tribute has been tailored from the essay Between Associates, by Helen W. Drutt English, printed in pages 198–207 of the catalog Past Bling: Up to date Jewellery from the Lois Boardman Assortment. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork, 2016.

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[i] Lois Boardman, Past Bling: Up to date Jewellery from the Lois Boardman Assortment, 2016, web page 177.