In 1985 the husband-and-wife team of Adrian Olabuenga and Lesley Bailey established the product-design company Acme Studios in Los Angeles. In addition to showing Olebuenga’s radio and furniture designs, the studio intended to produce and sell commercially manufactured cloisonné jewelry designed by internationally renowned designers, architects, and, later, artists. For many of the participants, it was their first time designing jewelry. For others, it was their first time designing mass-produced jewelry that would be reasonably gently priced and widely available through museum shops and other select boutiques. After Acme moved its headquarters to Maui, Hawaii, in 1988, its subsequent collections included pens, ties, and other object designs.

 

The first collection that the company produced was a series of twelve brooches designed by the artist and designer Peter Shire. Olebuenga had admired Shire’s ceramics, and when he discovered that Shire lived in Los Angeles and was interested in designing in other media, he invited him to create a jewelry collection.¹ Each brooch in the resulting Melrose Emblematic collection was named for a different Los Angeles street where it crossed Melrose Boulevard, the location of Acme’s first shop. Shire’s Wilcox brooch (right) commemorates the intersection of Wilcox and Melrose Avenues. In its color palette, composition, and motifs, it is most closely related to the Genesee brooch, also part of the Melrose series. Both works suggest sexual messages by way of their compositions and emblems. Wilcox is one of the most recognizable of all of Shire’s designs.  

 

At the time of their collaboration, Shire was also a member of the Italian design collective Memphis, cofounded by the architect and designer Ettore Sottsass in 1980–81 alongside a group of Milanese architects and designers. With an interest in bold color, surface pattern, and unconventional materials, Memphis designers prioritized function and aesthetics in their object designs while questioning design theory and broadening its language. Olabuenga met Sottsass when he and Shire attended a lecture that the designer was giving in New Orleans in 1985.² After introducing him to Acme’s wares, Olabuenga invited Sottsass to design jewelry for the studio. Sottsass agreed, asking that other Memphis designers also be included. Thus, the Memphis Designers for Acme collection was born.

 

One of Sottsass’s numerous contributions to the collection was the Lambello brooch (1986, bottom). In Italian, lambello is a term used in heraldry, specifically to indicate the symbol of three or more geometric drops hanging from a strip at the top (head) of a coat of arms. Sottsass, with humor, altered the symbol so that the entire brooch resembles the shape of a “head.” The three lobed elements, which resemble hair, a half-domed “hat,” and a “mouth,” further underscore its anthropomorphic nature.

 

Marco Zanini, an architect who worked at Sottsass Associati and a founding member of Memphis, also created a wide range of jewelry as part of the Memphis Designers collection. One such work, the Soledad brooch (1986, top), was directly inspired by the architecture of the front windows of the design showroom Grace Designs in Dallas, Texas, that Sottsass Associati designed in 1984.³ Zanini was on the design team for the gallery, sending drawings back and forth to Peter Zweig, the Houston-based architect who oversaw the project in the United States. The gallery featured a completely white interior with color used only on the exterior storefront. With its architectonic form punctuated by geometric volumes rendered in bright colors and assembled in stacked and diagonal compositions, the brooch reflects the view from the lobby of Dallas’s World Trade Center into the showroom (the white enamel voids represent the windows). Another of Zanini’s designs for the collection was the Oreilana brooch (1986, left). More austere than many of the other Memphis brooches, it nevertheless embodies its aesthetic with its bold hues, diverse composition of shapes, and laminate-like pattern. In addition, its asymmetrical and pierced form is characteristic of many of Zanini’s designs for Acme.

 

The Memphis for Acme collection debuted in 1986 in the shop of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York. The museum was the last venue on a ten-stop American tour for the exhibition Memphis/Milano, which introduced the furniture, ceramics, glass, lighting, metalwork, and design drawings associated with the movement. Acme’s decision to introduce the jewelry at the New York venue garnered it great attention in the press, thereby raising its profile and notably attracting sales. —Cindi Strauss