About Angela Tassoni
Angela Tassoni is a jewelry designer and visual artist who emerged in the late 1980s. Known for transforming found objects and accoutrements gathered from myriad corners of culture, her designs are sculptural and aesthetically complex, most aptly described as, “wearable art”. While traveling the globe working as a model for legendary designers Yoji Yamamoto, Helena Rubinstein, Dolce & Gabbana and Emilio Zegna, she began to collect Venetian glass beads, antique pendants, exotic and precious gemstones, freshwater pearls, and other readymade objects. She quickly began studies at the American University of Paris for Art History and took private lessons in oil painting from local artists in France. Beyond these intellectual and creative pursuits, her fascination and understanding of geology was a natural inclination being from one of the most geologically diverse landscapes in the world: Arizona.
Tassoni’s work is an exuberant admixture of jewelry design and art history, a celebration of objects from across time and space that blur their origins and emerge as wholly unique. To call them a celebration of movements from the Renaissance to high fashion would be missing what Ross Bleckner articulated by saying, "When you first see Angela Tassoni's Jewelry you are immediately connected to the dazzling and historical trope of the radiance of Velasquez paintings and the opulence of Versailles, as well as the simplicity of just taking a walk on the beach and noticing the patterns in nature. Her work has the presence of glamour past and the feel of contemporary life. Looking at Angela's jewelry can inspire paintings for years to come."
In 2012, she and American artist Will Cotton began a 6-month collaboration that would inspire candy sculptures and jewelry designs for his confectionary paintings. Her distinctive sense for pictorial space vis-à-vis fashion brought forth an arsenal of dresses and body wraps featured in his Spring 2013 Fashion Issue of New York Magazine. Onward and upward, The Museum of Arts and Design described Tassoni as “a beacon for jewelry”. The following year, MAD Chairman Barbara Tober was quoted, “I can certainly say that Angela Tassoni creates her jewelry as a work of Art.”
Albert Watson, Steven Meisel and Paolo Roversi—preeminent photographers in their own respective fields of fine art and fashion—captured Tassoni’s necklaces, which then caught the keen eye of British Vogue Jewelry Editor Carol Woolton. After seeing them in the flesh at a first-rate boutique in Mayfair, Woolton decided to include them in her acclaimed book Fashion for Jewels,100 Years of Styles and Icons.Tassoni’s necklaces were soon being photographed by Raymond Meier and popping up in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Tatler, W and WWD next to Fabergé, Tiffany and Van Cleef & Arpels.
Beginning in 2018, Tassoni became an Ambassador for "Cool Earth”, a non-profit organization that works alongside rainforest communities to halt deforestation and climate change. Her deep-rooted involvement with the Rainforest Alliance in New York has helped create a new awareness of some of the most pressing social and environmental issues of our time.
Looking deeply into the concentrated creations of Angela Tassoni, with their rich histories and spiritual connections, is like peering through an elegant kaleidoscope of celestial forms. They radiate textures and colors that would seduce anyone’s gaze, like the concentric patterns found in Italian castle architecture, drawing equally from the sensory pleasure of seeing light bend through and off crystals and precious metals, all while recomplicating and expounding upon their individual criterion. To wear art with a sense of history is her canon de vivre.
