User:Fiberdiva/Linda MacNeil

=Introduction= Linda MacNeil is an American artist specializing in contemporary jewelry that combines metalwork with glass and sometimes precious stones to create miniature sculptures. She studied metalsmithing at the Philadelphia College of Art and the Massachusetts College of Art and received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1976. She was introduced to glassmaking at the Massachusetts College of Art where she also met her husband, glass and metal sculptor Dan Dailey.

Kate Dobbs Ariail writing in Metalsmith about the Mint Museum of Craft and Design's exhibit; "Sculptural Radiance: The Jewelry and Objects of Linda MacNeil" notes that 'MacNeil evidences an unusually nuanced appreciation of her material. Her use of a variety of types of glass, along with various finishing techniques, gives her an unexpectedly broad palette of hue, value, tint and reflectivity, so that her crisp design takes on a painterly tone." Commenting on the same exhibition, Joan Falconer Byrd, professor of art at Western Carolina University, notes that 'MacNeil commands an extensive vocabulary of metal fabricating techniques.' For much of her career, MacNeil favored brass that she then had electroplated with gold.

One of the glass making techniques Linda employs is lost wax casting with pate de verre to create intricate shapes with great surface detail. Her work was chosen as an example of this technique, which was very popular in the nineteenth century Art Deco movement, by Jeffrey B. Snyder in Art Jewelry Today 2 Insert Nile Grass Floral image

Series
Mesh Nexus Floral

Museum Collections
Museum of Art and Design, NY Museum of Modern Art, NY Mint Museum of Art and Design, Charlotte, NC