2024 Salon Art + Design
Leans Into Natural Diamonds

Every year, Salon Art + Design showcases vintage, modern, and contemporary art pieces from leading art and design galleries from around the globe in New York City. This curated collection of art includes fine art, home design pieces, and most recently jewelry and wearable art.

Jewelry exhibitions are still new for Salon Art + Design, but with each year of jewelry inclusion, the natural diamonds on display become more exceptional, unique and cutting edge. This year, a highlight at the show is the Michele Oka Doner Collection, presented in the Elisabetta Cipriani Gallery, where wearable art is showcased and celebrated.

Elisabetta Cipriani and her Gallery are based in London but she shares excldusively with Only Natural Diamonds that she’s excited to showcase in NYC. “[New York is] a city where there is a lot of interesting energy and connection to the world of artist jewelry and I want to explore that by coming to New York, by participating at a fair like the Salon.”

Cipriani first met Oka Doner many years ago, but always stayed in touch. “We never lost [our] connection,” remembers the gallerist. “I was always waiting for her moment when she was ready.” Eventually, a meeting of the minds came when Oka Doner invited Cipriani to New York. “We spent two hours together, which seemed two minutes, it just flew,” says Cipriani with a smile. “Michele showed me all her archive pieces and she was brainstorming what to do, how to do it, and that’s how it started.”

The collection came together for the 2024 Salon Art + Design as an homage to the Botanic Age, “a time long before the Stone Age, when plants and trees were central to human development and creativity,” according to a press release from Elisabetta Cipriani Gallery. It includes a series of nine, one-of-a-kind brooches in bronze, 18-karat white gold and vintage cut diamonds called “Winter Branches: An Ongoing Conversation,” a bronze, 18-karat yellow cold and natural diamond talisman called “Talisman,” and a limited edition of 5 electro-formed silver boxes called “Mitosis.”

Working with natural diamonds was very important to Oka Doner, who sees the gemstones as “mythic” with a “sense of magic.” They also lent themselves perfectly to the natural theme of the collection, specifically on her branch-like brooches: “I could imagine morning dew, I could imagine frost… [on the] winter branches ” she says. “So if you have the softer, the old diamonds, you perceive first the shape and then you look again and you see what is ephemeral.”

“Diamonds work to tell the story that I want to tell,” Oka Doner adds, noting that natural diamonds have been revered for centuries. “I’m just speaking of the magic and the aura… it didn’t take anything to let our ancestors know that this beautiful, shiny thing that had a depth and is faceted differently by so many cultures… but all these cultures couldn’t wait to get their hands on it and bestow it.”

Cipriani worked with Oka Doner to help release her inner creative on this project, and Oka Doner notes, “it was nice to have a sort of co-pilot, somebody who was going to play with me in this sandbox. And that’s what we did!”

Cipriani always dives head-first with the artists she works with, imbuing every collaboration with passion. “I want to leave a mark in the history of art for the jewelry. That’s my mission,” she shares. “in the case of Michele, through her pieces we are connected to nature, we are going back to nature. They are reminders of something. And because of that, you keep them close to you and you don’t forget them because they symbolize something important.”

2024 Salon Art + Design is open to the public from November 7 to November 11, 2024 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City.