Seven Decades, 78 Pieces: A New York Museum Turns the Jewelry Box Into a Queer Time Capsule

At the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, a new show called OUT of the Jewelry Box gathers 78 pieces made across seven decades and reads them less as accessories than as evidence. Here the brooch, the chain, the ring stands in for something bigger — identity, desire, loss, community — the private things a piece of jewelry can hold that a red-carpet photograph never quite captures. It is exactly the kind of exhibit that rewards our usual instincts: date the piece, name the decade, ask what it was doing on a body before it ever reached a vitrine. Seventy-eight objects and seven decades is a long archive to hang on something so small and so worn close.

With reporting from Vogue.