Join jewelry historian Toni Greenbaum and MAD Senior Curator Barbara Paris Gifford for a discussion of the recently published jewelry tome, Feast: Contemporary Jewelry from the Susan Beech Collection. Since 1991, Beech has been transforming her house in Tiburon, California, into an extraordinary environment, in which the themes of her extensive jewelry collection interact with craft and fine art, all against a backdrop of Art Deco glamour.

Book contributors Greenbaum and Gifford will discuss topics ranging from the latest insights into American narrative jewelry to the history of contemporary art jewelry and its relationship with beauty. Additionally, in honor of Beech’s major donation this year of over one hundred and fifty pieces to MAD’s modern and contemporary jewelry collection, a selection of the Beech collection’s exceptional works from prominent artists will be on view. 

Pre-order your copy of Feast: Contemporary Jewelry from the Susan Beech Collection here for a book signing after the talk.

About the panelists

Barbara Paris Gifford is Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Craft, and Design at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York City. She oversees MAD’s renowned jewelry collection and has helped organize over twenty exhibitions, including Counter Couture: Handmade Fashion in an American Counterculture (2017), The World of Anna Sui (2019-20), and Jewelry Stories: Highlights from the Collection 1947-Now (2020- ongoing), for which she edited a comprehensive catalogue. Most recently she presented Out of the Jewelry Box (2024-6), an exhibition and catalogue exploring the intersection of Queerness and contemporary jewelry, and Douriean Fletcher: Jewelry of the Afrofuture (2025-6). She is an expert in jewelry and fashion and has written and presented on these subjects for numerous publications and venues. Gifford holds an MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center, NY.

Toni Greenbaum is a New York-based art historian specializing in twentieth and twenty-first century jewelry and metalwork. She wrote Messengers of Modernism: American Studio Jewelry 1940-1960, Sam Kramer: Jeweler on the Edge, and the entries on jewelry and metalwork for Design 1935-1965: What Modern Was, along with numerous book chapters, exhibition catalogues, and essays for arts publications. She is currently working on a monograph about modernist jeweler Art Smith, to be published by Smithsonian Books in fall 2026.

Greenbaum has lectured internationally at institutions such as the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Savannah. She has worked on exhibitions for many museums, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; and Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York. From 2014-2022 Greenbaum was a professor at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, where she taught a course in Theory and Criticism of Contemporary Jewelry.