Fans of Barbara Natoli Witt remember one-of-a-kind East Bay jewelry artist

Friends and family of East Bay artist Barbara Natoli Witt, whose remarkable macrame necklaces are in museum collections and proudly worn by celebrities and fashionistas, gathered in Berkeley to honor and remember the beloved designer.

“Unique, complex and bold” is how Andrea Scharff, who hosted the Sept. 21 celebration of life at her home, described both the artwork and personality of her friend Witt, who died at 87 of cancer in May.

“She was a master of creating things of beauty,” said Scharff, who added that upon meeting Witt, the artist held her in her confidence “just like a hypnotist” within minutes.

Steven Jenner, Witt’s husband of 44 years, joked that Witt was wearing one her exquisite necklaces when they met in 1980: “Naturally, I admired her chest,” said Jenner.

Jenner, a Walnut Creek photographer and proprietor of Local Color Cards who supplied the beautiful pieces on display at gathering, also shot the lustrous photos in Lois Sherr Dubin’s 2011 coffee table book “Adornment: The Art of Barbara Natoli Witt,” which details how Witt’s success was facilitated by a network of women. Witt’s supporters and elite clients included model-photographer Nancy Holmes, fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert, magazine editor Diana Vreeland, singer-actress Dinah Shore and writer Clare Boothe Luce.

Minie Mitchell, owner of A Loft of One’s Own, a shop and gallery in Emeryville carrying Witt’s necklaces (prices start at $5,000), was among several women wearing a Witt design at the memorial.

“It gives me so much confidence,” said Mitchell, whose plans to learn how to create a necklace from Witt were cut short when the artist died just a month after they met.

Scharff described how Witt applied her artistic process, starting with mapping out a design on graph paper and using carefully sourced materials, to both jewelry making and designing the custom log cabin on Grizzly Peak Boulevard in the Oakland hills where she lived for decades.

Some of Witt’s 1,700 distinctively unique, historically referenced-and-researched necklaces are in permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, National Design Museum, The Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Oakland Museum of California, the Museo ItaloAmericano, San Francisco, and Newark Museum in New Jersey.

Witt, who in the early 1970s displayed her work on card tables at art festivals in Northern California, incorporated symbolism, ancient and modern beads and artifacts and dyed thread into each piece. Her commissions also could include personal treasures provided by her clients.

A New Jersey native whose parents were from Sicily, Witt was “very Italian,” Scharff said. She was known for her plentiful hand gesturing, sharing homemade cannoli and generosity in general. An art student at Cooper Union, a private college in New York, Witt met her first husband, architect Ronald Witt (with whom she had a son, Marc Stefan Witt), while studying art at the University of California, Berkeley.

When asked how long it would take Witt to create a piece, Jenner quipped, “It depended on how much she needed the money,” and about a week at the fastest.

Some of Witt’s creations are on sale. For more information, visit https://www.necklaceart.com/.

The post Fans of Barbara Natoli Witt remember one-of-a-kind East Bay jewelry artist appeared first on Local News Matters.