Eleanor Moty

Eleanor Moty (born 1945), is an American metalsmith and jewelry artist. Her experimentation with industrial processes, such as photoetching and electroforming, was revolutionary in the field of American art jewelry in the 1960s and 1970s.

Career

Childhood

Eleanor Moty was born in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Moty was raised on a rural farm with little exposure to art as a child. In high school, Moty made and sold stained glass. Her first introduction to jewelry was a trip with her high school art teacher to Northern Illinois University. Following this visit, she attended a little sister weekend with her older sister Joyce at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This trip solidified her decision to study jewelry there with Robert von Neumann.

Early career

Moty attended the University of Illinois, Urbana and earned her BFA in 1968. While there she explored electroplating, electroforming, and the photographic image in her work. She studied under Robert van Neumann and visiting artist J. Fred Woell. She learned photo fabrication techniques in engineering laboratories with technician Jim Cummings. Metal artist and sculptor, Albert Paley, was a year ahead of Moty at Tyler, where he also taught as an assistant. He offered Moty technical advice and influenced her pin stem and metals designs. During graduate school, Moty became aware of the jewelry work of Miye Matsukata. She respected Matsukata's incorporation of non-precious stones such as rutilated quartz with precious stones and found objects. Creating settings for stones such as rutilated and tourmalinated quartz remained a material of interest for Moty over the next thirty years.

Mid-career

Moty was an early pioneer of the processes of photo etching and electroplating as applied to jewelry and led lectures and workshops on the subject. She also contributed to an authoritative article on photo etching processes for jewelry and three dimensional work in Craft Horizons in 1971. In 1972 she began teaching at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, after visiting her 1976 retrospective at the Oakland Museum. In 1980 Moty was the first woman and first humanities professor to receive the H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship for excellence in teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She received two National Endowment for the Arts craftsmen's fellowships in 1988 and 1975. From 1982 to 1991 she was a trustee of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine. She was an honorary board member of the James Renwick Alliance from 1996 to 1999.