Desert Jewels: North African Jewelry and Photography from the Xavier Guerrand-Hermes CollectionFor millennia North Africa, including the nations of Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya and Egypt, has served as a crossroads for the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. Starting well before the Christian era, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Romans and Greeks mingled with the Amazigh peoples, also known as Berbers.
The North African collection of jewelry and photography assembled by Xavier Guerrand-Hermès over several decades provides insight into the region’s changing societies. The wide range of jewelry illustrates the diversity and enduring beauty of North Africa’s artistic traditions, while the compelling images show daily life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,.
In the elaborate jewelry worn by North African women, a profusion of pendants, colored enamels and precious or semi-precious stones transform the pieces into flamboyant and conspicuous works of art. Women receive jewelry from their husbands when they marry, and they wear them as symbolic expressions of social codes and identity. In certain shapes and materials, jewelry is seen as a way to protect the wearer. The hand, or khamsa, is considered a potent shield against the evil eye.
Beginning in the 1860s, European photographers set up studios in the major cities of North Africa, photographing women wearing their extraordinary jewels, as well as markets, ancient archaeological sites and landscapes. The images were mounted on cabinet cards into the 1890s, when the format was replaced by picture postcards. Studios also sold larger prints of photographs which were acquired by European tourists, artists and collectors. Works from some of the most famous photographers of the time, including Étienne and Louis Neurdein, J. Pascal Sebah, A. Cavilla, J. Garrigues and George Washington Wilson, are part of this collection.
Organized by the Museum for African Art, New York, Desert Jewels features approximately eighty examples of exquisite North African jewelry and nearly thirty original photographs taken in Morocco, Algeria and Egypt in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A full color catalogue with essays by Cynthia Becker and Kristyne Loughran accompanies the exhibition.
The national tour of Desert Jewels is sponsored by Merrill Lynch. The exhibition is supported in part by the Robert Lehman Foundation.
26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Philadelphia, PA 19130
September 4, 2010-December 5, 2010
Tuesday through Sunday:
10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
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