Art historian Jewel Stern, A.B. ’54, M.A. ’78, grew up in a Miami Beach resonating with zigzags and the sweeping curves of Art Deco design. “It was the dominant aesthetic of my childhood,” she says.

During the mid-1980s, Stern fully asserted her modernist taste at home by disposing of her traditional wedding silver, an act that left her awkwardly bereft of serving pieces at a subsequent dinner party she and her husband hosted. She was window-shopping on New York’s Second Avenue when an Art Deco-era sterling silver hors d’oeuvre tray caught her eye—the piece that marked the beginning of what would become one of the world’s most significant collections of modern American mass-produced silver spanning the years 1925 to 2000.

This November the Jewel Stern American Silver Collection arrived at The Wolfsonian–FIU in an exhibition called Modernism in American Silver: 20th-Century Design, organized by the Dallas Museum of Art (which acquired her collection in 2002). Because few scholarly references existed, Stern built her collection and accompanying archive like a veteran gumshoe: interviewing industry leaders, searching manufacturers’ records, and thumbing through magazine advertisements and patent books. Stern’s award-winning catalog, published by Yale University Press, provides a summary of her meticulous research. “I love the detective work,” she explains.

After receiving her master’s degree in art history, Stern achieved success as a visual artist, photographing, among other things, the hotel towers in Miami Beach as the portfolio Project Skyline. Her work has been exhibited at the Lowe Art Museum and is held in the permanent collection. She recently parlayed her master’s thesis on architect Ely Jacques Kahn into a book coauthored with John A. Stuart, an associate professor of architecture at FIU, published this summer by W. W. Norton.

Stern has personally seen almost every example of modern American silver ever produced. Among the few elusive ones: a pair of “Dorian” candlesticks by the Watson Company, made in 1935. “Maybe one of these days….” For this silver sleuth, it’s only a matter of time.

— Leslie Sternlieb