Merry Renk, a pioneering jewelry artist who was also an accomplished painter and sculptor, died June 17 at the age of 90. 

Renk was born on July 8, 1921 in Trenton, New Jersey, and attended her hometown's School of Industrial Design from 1939 to 1941 to study painting. She became actively involved with fine art studies during the World War II years, which brought major changes in her personal life, including the death of her first husband in the War. Moving to Chicago in 1946, she studied at the Institute of Design, with the intention of becoming an industrial designer. Then, in 1947, she was one of a trio of students who founded a new gallery on Dearborn Street called 750 STUDIO, exhibiting painting, sculpture, photography, and crafts. Renk and the other students slept in the rear of their gallery; in the front, they showed artists of distinction, including Maholy-Nagy, Margaret de Patta, and Robert von Neumann, even the author Henry Miller, who was a passionate watercolor painter. Renk liked having her own business, and proved to have an eye for what would sell in the contemporary jewelry market. 

Renk’s experience at the gallery led to her fascination and experimentation with enamels - which became, for her, a link between painting and craft. It wasn’t too long before she exclusively worked with wire and metal. In 1948 she left behind school and the gallery, traveling in Europe to expand her artistic knowledge before eventually settling in San Francisco.

In California, Renk further developed her techniques working with gold and gemstones. Her unique sculptural earrings, rings, and necklaces - featuring organic forms reminiscent of branches, roots, vines, or shells - quickly became sought after objects. By the mid-1950s, she was selling work from her home studio and starting to exhibit both locally and nationally, at museums including the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York City, the Huntington Gallery in West Virginia, and the Wichita Art Association in Kansas. During this time, she also began creating intricate crowns, inspired by fairytales she read and games she played with her sister as a child. In 1958, she married the potter Earle Curtis, with whom she had two daughters, Bonnie and Sandra.

In 1969, Renk was asked to make a large jewelry piece for exhibition “Objects: USA,” sponsored by S.C. Johnson and featuring 250 artists from across the United States. Renk took the opportunity to create one of the largest ornamental objects of her career, a wedding crown formed of interlocking gold petals, topped with 240 pearls. She named the remarkable piece White Cloud. It was an immediate sensation and her interest in crown-making continued, including the designs her daughters wore on their wedding days.

Renk continued to work as a professional goldsmith, creating both jewelry and small metal sculptures until 1982, when, at age 60, she decided to switch her focus back to painting. She explored this medium, often creating colorful watercolors based on memories from her past and portraits of friends and neighbors, throughout the remaining years of her life.               

Over the years this primarily self-taught artist and craftswoman received several honors, including being named a Distinguished Member of the Society of North American Goldsmiths; an NEA Fellowship (1974); a Distinguished Work and Achievement in Crafts Award from the City and County of San Francisco (1986); and induction into the American Craft Council College of Fellows (1994). Today, Renk’s work can be found in many museum collections, including the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Oakland Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.   

Upon being inducted into the ACC College of Fellows, Renk had this to say about her career in the crafts:

I have searched for beauty, designing structures of timeless lyrical dimensions. I have sought to combine strength and delicacy in this miniature world. I wouldn’t have given up my time at my workbench to anyone. I enjoyed the whole process: using the saw to take my designs from paper to metal, seeing the beauty of the torch as it fuses one piece of metal to another, and focusing on the intimate details, like small gems. What a treasure it has been to make my living as a goldsmith.

For more information on remembrance services and events for Merry, please visit the Metal Arts Guild of San Francisco. We also recommend this extensive oral history interview conducted by jeweler Arline Fisch for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Museum, and a video of Renk’s crowns, including narration of poems she wrote to explain each crown’s name, at her website.