About the Artist and her Art:

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Barbara Natoli Witt is a contemporary artist with the rare distinction of having created her own medium. Her unique necklaces blend tapestry techniques to form intriguing webs of colored threads, ancient beads, and gem stones which capture at their centers precious sculptured pieces, artifacts, and heirloom treasures.

In the course of her 50-year career she has introduced a new facet of jewelry arts, perpetuating the beauty of the ancient, the ethnic, and the exquisitely quaint within a framework of contemporary beauty and utility. Her work is included in many outstanding collections including the Smithsonian Institution, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, The Museum of Arts and Design in New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Oakland Museum of California, the Museo ItaloAmericano, San Francisco, Newark Museum,Newark New Jersey, and the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta.

An exhibition, organized by Kathleen Rowold, Ph.D., professor and curator of the Elizabeth Sage Historic Costume Collection at Indiana University, included 35 contemporary necklaces into which had been incorporated art from the ancient old world. This exhibit was mounted at the Museo ItaloAmericano in San Francisco, California and was displayed from April 5th through July 8th, 2006.

From there the exhibit traveled to Winston-Salem, North Carolina where it was redesigned by curator Billy McClain and displayed at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art October 28th, 2006 through January 7, 2007. In this presentation, the necklaces were selected to illustrate the work held in public and private collections in the South.

Immediately following, an exhibition opened in San Antonio, Texas. This exhibit was designed by curator Nancy Fullerton to illustrate the symbols and art forms of some of the various cultures in the wide ranging permanent collections of the San Antonio Museum of Art. This exhibit was displayed from January 20th through March 18th, 2007 and was featured during the Mays Seminar on the Decorative Arts February 10th, 2007.

Ms. Witt has been invited to speak at a number of symposia. In 2017 she participated in ”Collecting the Past – Crafting the Future” at the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Mays Symposium.  She was also the guest speaker at the Bill Blass Fashion Design Seminar, at Indiana University in 2013.  Recently her “meteorite collar” was included in ”Out of this World! Jewelry in the Space Age ”, an exhibit which was shown at  the Tellus Science Museum, Cartersville, Georgia; the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburg; and the Forbes Gallery, New York.