Foreword and Acknowledgments

Foreword and Acknowledgements

This publication documents the first museum exhibition focusing solely on the artistic work, career, widespread influence, and feminist social activism of Clara Barck Welles (American, 1869–1965), one of the nation’s most noteworthy early 20th century artisans and entrepreneurs. The exhibition and book showcase works in the collections of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and the Portland Art Museum, together with rarely exhibited pieces from select private collections. Welles’s fascinating life and career—including youth on a farm outside Oregon City—are outlined here, with contributions by Arts & Crafts scholars Sharon S. Darling and Darcy L. Evon.

Clara Barck Welles has long been recognized as the founder and owner of the Kalo Shop of Chicago, famous for its elegant Arts & Crafts silver hollowware, flatware, and jewelry. Throughout the half-century of Welles’s tenure there, the Kalo Shop established a reputation for design and craft of the highest order, and for furthering the Arts & Crafts ethos in America. As the works in A New Woman demonstrate, Kalo Shop silver embodied the company’s motto, “beautiful, useful, and enduring.” Under her tutelage, the Kalo Shop trained and supported generations of designers, jewelers, and silversmiths, from its heyday in the early 1900s through the Depression. As Darling noted in Chicago Metalsmiths (1977), it was “the city’s most influential concern producing hand wrought silver,” and one of the most important Arts & Crafts centers in the country.

A New Woman – Clara Barck Welles, Inspiration and Influence in Arts & Crafts Silver was a labor of love for all of the contributors and lenders, made possible at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum

of Art through generous donations supporting the museum. The exhibition and its installation design were planned in collaboration with Marilyn Archer, Curatorial and Design Consultant, and Margo Grant Walsh, Consultant. My thanks to both for their collaboration and support, particularly Margo, whose discerning eye, collecting acumen, knowledge and deep appreciation of Kalo silver and the important contributions of Clara Barck Welles made all of this possible.

The exhibition and publication build on Sharon Darling’s groundbreaking 1977 book, and on Darcy Evon’s equally essential Hand Wrought Arts & Crafts Metalwork & Jewelry, 1890 – 1940 (2014). I cannot thank them enough for supporting this project so generously through their writing and advice, and in Evon’s case, making and facilitating important loans to the exhibition.

I thank the Portland Art Museum and its director of collections and exhibitions, Donald Urquart, and director Brian Ferriso for lending such stellar examples of Kalo silver to the JSMA during the challenging time of the COVID pandemic. My thanks to Joshua Bair, Darcy Evon, Robert Maxwell, Robert Taylor, Naoma Tate, and John Walcher for supporting the show with loans of exceptional quality.

My thanks to our collections manager Chris White and registrar Erin Doerner for their timely and effective work bringing all of the silver here safely, and to Chris for his much valued support throughout this complex project. Thanks as well to the JSMA’s installation staff, Joey Capadona, Mark O’Hara, and Beth Robinson-Hartpence for their superb work mounting the exhibition, and to the JSMA’s graphic designer, Mike Bragg, for his excellent work on installation graphics and publications, including this book. Exhibition photography was ably provided by the JSMA’s photographer Jonathan Smith. Editor and proofreader Susan Mannheimer applied her skilled attention to all texts for this project, and Debbie Williamson Smith assisted with our public relations and communications efforts. My thanks to all.

Clara Barck Welles was a unique woman who made a lasting contribution to her time, both artistically and socially. It has been a pleasure to learn her story and to help share it with the world.

John S. Weber

Executive Director