Winter Salon Exhibition: Gallery Artists + Guest Artisan Alistair McCowan — 2025

The Robin Rice Gallery proudly announces the Winter Salon Exhibition featuring gallery artists and guest artisan, metal worker, and jeweler, Alistair McCowan. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, November 22, from 5 pm to 7 pm.

Rice brings together the works of her gallery artists. Inside the front entrance as you enter the gallery, displayed on three shelves will be all the paintings and drawings. The walls of the main exhibition space will be a mosaic of various-sized photographs in sepia, color and black & white, expertly hung salon-style to fit together like pieces of a puzzle.“This is my favorite exhibition, even though it takes months to curate and a week to install,” says Rice. “There is something for everyone.”

Rice has a close relationship with the works of her artists and photographers. Rice strategically curates the show to best exemplify the artists’ strengths, remaining cohesively linked by Rice’s aesthetic. 

The participating Artists and Photographers will be detailed after we install the exhibition next week. 

Guest Artisan: Alistair McGowan, Metal Worker and Jeweler. 

This collaboration was conceived after Robin attended a styled salon setting at the home of Alistair McCowan and his wife Hilary Robertson in 2023 in Hudson, NY. She was moved by the symbiotic visual language of McCowan’s jewelry, which inspired her to invite and partner with McCowan. 

In England, they might call Alistair McCowan a ‘magpie’, a British term for a collector or scavenger, a treasure hunter with an unquenchable thirst for The Find. Since childhood, Alistair has always been on the hunt for fascinating things; rare, special, curious, hopefully overlooked and potentially valuable things. Childhood museum visits to the British Museum had introduced him to the jewels of the Egyptian Pharaohs and he was particularly drawn to the craftsmanship and tactile textures of Byzantine treasures. Stories about the Gold Rush, buried treasure, shipwrecks filled with golden doubloons thrilled him, and so naturally the discovery of Andy Warhol’s extensive jewelry collection, a priceless cache, found hidden in his Upper East Side apartment after his death and later auctioned by Sotheby’s, really grabbed McCowan’s attention.  Although he couldn’t bid for a bracelet, he was able to acquire the catalog and countless other volumes which taught him to hone his taste for fabulous things.

After years of collecting jewelry. He attended two evening courses, one at Pratt Institute (an art school in Brooklyn) and the other at Brooklyn Metalworks. Within a year, he was selling his wares to friends and colleagues and had graduated from Finder to Maker.

The red thread that connects his evolving collection of cast bronze rings and cuffs is his interest in the work of the St. Ives group of artists and sculptors, specifically Barbara Hepworth and her husband, Ben Nicholson.

 He sees the jewelry as wearable sculpture for people who can handle adding some art (and weight) to their wrists and fingers. ‘I can’t make anything delicate; my hands are too large, and my eyesight isn’t good enough for delicate pieces, ’ he explains.