When the cityâ€s metalwork factories were vying to meet worldwide demand in the early 20th century, Mr. Dietz said at a preview, “Newark was the Detroit of the jewelry world.”

Technological innovations on view include foldable eyeglasses, and porcelain and glass vessels trimmed with electrodeposited silver. The objects sometimes have multiple connections to people in Newark; a 1904 trophy made by the local firm William B. Kerr was awarded to the owner of a nearby printing company who won a harness race at a track in a local park.

Mr. Dietz, the museumâ€s senior curator, has brought out company drawings, salesmenâ€s samples and catalog pages drawn partly from recent gifts like the archive of the onetime major jewelry manufacturer Krementz & Company. When Krementz descendants offered the material, Mr. Dietz said, “we piled my car up with suitcases and boxes.”

Other recent scholarly studies of precious-metals artisans have focused on Virginia, Philadelphia, Savannah and New York City. An exhibition about Cincinnati silver opens in June at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and a jewelry show planned for next year at the Richard H. Driehaus Museum in Chicago will display pieces that were fashioned locally.

The word “Savannah” in the article is a hyperlink to the University of Georgia Press page for The Story of Silver in Savannah by Tania June Sammons, the curator of the Owens-Thomas House and of decorative arts at the Telfair Museums. The foreward is by former Telfair director Steven High, who is now at the helm of the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota.

From the description of Sammons’ book, which was published as the catalog for a major exhibit:

Adding to the Telfairâ€s growing body of work on Savannahâ€s material culture, The Story of Silver in Savannah features more than one hundred color photographs of pieces of silver connected to the city. With discussions and portraits of simple spoons made by Savannah silversmiths, elaborate tea sets and dinnerwares owned by historic Savannah families, and contemporary collections that feature important examples of American and English silver, this catalog explores the evolving relationship between this prized metal and the inhabitants of Savannah.

It’s an interesting development.

Safdie is a renowned architect with a stunning list of major projects that includes Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. (Wal-Mart money); Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City; Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv; Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv; Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem; and Habitat ’67, the innovative Olympic residences in Montreal decades ago.

The list also includes the Telfair Museums’ Jepson Center for the Arts.

In recent years, SCAD’s commencement speakers have included “James Cromwell, Whoopi Goldberg, Glenn Close, Vogue editor-at-large André Leon Talley, Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Philippe de Montebello, playwright Edward Albee and movie critic Joel Siegel.”

Now, those are all perfectly fine commencement speakers, in my opinion, especially for an art school that also offers performing arts and film. Those are serious people, but the list still has a celebrity ring to it — which is entirely fine and appropriate.

But Safdie seems like something of an outlier. He’s not a celebrity by any stretch. He probably gets recognized in public more than I imagine, but he’s hardly a household name or face. Many SCAD grads may not have known James Cromwell’s name, but I’ll bet they and their parents recognized him as soon as they saw his face and heard his voice.

Longtime Savannahians might also know that there has historically been some tension between the Telfair Museums and SCAD. In part, this seems to have to do with personnel decisions made years ago, and I should note that the tensions seem to have faded markedly over the years.

But institutional tensions and personalities resonate throughout bureaucracies. Once a certain institutional attitude is created, it can be hard to change. All of Savannah’s major institutions have their own defining characteristics.

I know I’m being too cryptic here for some of you, but that’s what you get. It’s a blog.

The upshot of all this is that I suspect many of tomorrow’s graduates have never even set foot inside the Jepson, despite the fact that it’s the most important building constructed in many decades in Savannah, despite the fact that it would be a logical destination for SCAD students to visit routinely, and despite the fact that the building’s architect is a towering figure of the profession — one important enough to deserve the honor of delivering a commencement address.

Here’s a shot I posted to my Instagram account recently of the side of the Jepson, while dozens of people were hoping to see a Kanye West video projection outside and a Nigerian wedding was taking place inside.

UPDATE: Here’s Safdie at the Jepson with Telfair director Lisa Grove and (I think) Bob Jepson. No word on whether any SCAD staff joined him there:

The centerpiece of those shows is Journey to the Beloved Community: Story Quilts by Beth Mount. You can read more about that show and related ones on the Telfair website and the Chatham-Savannah Citizen Advocacy website.

In my column today, I mention some of the content of artist Beth Mount’s recent talk at TEDxCreativeCoast. I’m embedding that talk here — it’s well worth a watch and a listen.

One of Beth Mount’s story quilts

I Am The Beloved Community: Story Quilts of Our Savannah

August 10-December 16 / JC / Second Floor Gallery

Organized by Loop It Up Savannah of West Broad Street, this exhibition is a collection of neighborhood story quilts made by the children of the West Broad Street YMCA, Boys and Girls Club of the Coastal Empire and the seniors of the City of Savannah Hudson Hill Golden Age Center and documented by international students from the Savannah College of Art and Design English as a Second Language Department

Artist and activist Beth Mount at the 34th Annual Chatham-Savannah Citizen Advocacy Covered Dish Supper

Waddie Welcome and the Beloved Community Program

September 27 / 6 pm / JC

Lecture will feature Beth Mount, Tom Kohler, and Susan Earl. Free and open to the public.

Eye to Eye: The Making of We

Opening reception Friday, September 28 / 7 pm

September 28 – October 24 / Indigo Sky Gallery, 915 Waters Avenue

Coordinated by Jerome Meadows, five Savannah artists exhibit original art created in response to the interplay and personal dynamics that exist between people involved in collaboration with Chatham-Savannah Citizen Advocacy.

Here’s Beth Mount at TEDxCreativeCoast:

I’ve been involved with the local Citizen Advocacy office in a variety of capacities for over a decade, and I’m fortunate to count its 3 core employees — Tom Kohler, Robin Gunn, and Ashley O’Brien — among my friends.

While Citizen Advocacy has always been a movement emphasizing freely chosen, one-to-one commitments between advocates and proteges with developmental disabilities, the organization occasionally takes the public stage.

And that’s certainly the case beginning in July, when Beth Mount’s exhibit Story Quilts opens at the Telfair Museums’ Jepson Center here in Savannah. A few of the lush and colorful quilts were on display at last week’s big potluck dinner (you can see them in my photos at the above link), and you can obviously read a snippet about them on the rack card embedded here.

Also on July 19th, we’ll celebrate the Jepson opening of Seeing Savannah: Lyn Bonham’s View of Citizen Advocacy. Lyn has been capturing advocates and proteges for over a decade.

In August, an exhibit of story quilts created by local children will open. I Am The Beloved Community: Story Quilts of Our Savannah is being organized by Loop It Up Savannah of the West Broad YMCA. You can read more about that on the rack card here — it’s a project that boasts some impressive collaboration.

Susan Earl and Tom Kohler will talk about their book Waddie Welcome and the Beloved Community at the Jepson on September 27th.

There will also be an exhibit this fall at Jerome Meadows’ Indigo Sky Gallery: Eye-to-Eye: The Making of We.

So mark your calendars now for all these exhibits and events showcasing the Savannah community at its most inclusive.

The Banjo Lesson

One of the best paintings hanging in the Telfair Academy rotunda here in Savannah is a landscape that Tanner painted the year he turned 21 — and about a decade before Tanner headed to Paris.

The Telfair's untitled painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner

The interview is well worth the 8 minutes:

In the spring of 1825, when Beethoven was 54, he became terribly sick. He was in bed for a month and he wrote to his doctor, “I am not feeling well … I am in great pain.” The doctor put Beethoven on a strict regimen, warning, “No wine, no coffee, no spices of any kind.” The doctor also advised Beethoven to get away from the city to where he could find fresh air and “natural milk.”

Beethoven followed his doctor’s orders and moved to the Baden region in May. He eventually recovered, but his illness scared him — at one point, he thought he would die.

Throughout his sickness, Beethoven worked on a new string quartet, his Op. 132 in A minor. It would last almost twice as long as his First Symphony. The music begins ominously with four dark, uncertain notes, then travels through paths of pain and suffering, eventually triumphing in sunlight.

The post has great audio of the performance of Op. 132 by the Emerson Quartet — Eugene Drucker, violin; Philip Setzer, violin; Lawrence Dutton, viola; and David Finckel, cello — from earlier this week performing in the rotunda of the Telfair Academy at the Savannah Music Festival.

But here’s another NPR piece from a couple of days ago: Milos Karadaglic And The Power Of A Dusty Old Guitar.

There seems to be a kink in the NPR website at the moment that’s preventing me from scrolling through all the text, but the link to listen to the performance seems to be working just fine.

Here’s what the SMF program online had to say about Karadaglic and his performance in Savannah:

This is the Savannah debut of Montenegro born, 27-year old prize-winning guitarist Milos Karadaglic, who has established himself as one of today’s most gifted young classical guitar virtuosos. A darling of the 2011 BBC Proms, Milos recent engagements have also included recital debuts at Wigmore Hall in London and the Lucerne Festival, and concerto debuts with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and English Chamber Orchestra.

And here’s a great video of Karadaglic performing a Tiny Desk Concert on NPR:

The program airing today (you can listen at the above link) was recorded at the Telfair Academy on March 28th.

It’s a 62-minute performance of Anton Arensky: String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 35 and Tchaikovsky: Souvenir de Florence, Op. 70 (for string sextet).

The performers include:
Daniel Hope, violin
Philip Dukes, viola
and the following from the Arensky ensemble:
Benny Kim, violin
Josephine Knight, cello
Keith Robinson, cello
Carla Maria Rodrigues, viola

From NPR’s description:

In this program, Hope and his handpicked group of players begin with a musical memorial to Tchaikovsky and close with music by the master himself. When Tchaikovsky died in 1893 at age 53, he left more than a few young Russian composers devastated. Sergei Rachmaninov responded with a brooding, elegiac piano trio dedicated to Tchaikovsky’s memory. Anton Arensky went one step further in his Second String Quartet, borrowing one of Tchaikovsky’s best-loved melodies (from the song “Legend”) to serve as the emotional heart of the piece. There’s a palpable air of solemnity in Arensky’s music, written for the non-traditional ensemble of violin, viola and two cellos. Arensky later revamped his three-movement piece by extracting the central movement, a set of variations on Tchaikovsky’s song, and beefing it up into a stand-alone piece for string orchestra.

Go to the link to listen and to read more. As I keep noting, this is amazing PR for the entire city.