SUZANNE DEMISCH GIVES COLLECTIBLE SILVERWORK

“the artist Maria Pergay started her career by creating ornate metal pieces for window displays in Paris and two years later began experimenting with silver, producing items like Champagne buckets, letter openers shaped like belts, trays with silver tassels, and sleek cigarette cases. When I met Maria in 2004, she gave me one of her silver boxes, and I still have it. In 2006, after we presented an exhibition of new productions from Maria, I started to give the boxes (from $225) as gifts. The first one I found was at a Paris flea market. I gifted it to a client. Since then, I’ve looked everywhere: auctions, flea markets, and dealers, mainly in France. It’s not something I can do every year, but I do it when I can.

I started collecting Sheila Hicks’s exhibition catalogues, books, and postcards sometime around 2010. She has always been very prolific and often creates printed catalogues to document her exhibitions. Usually I find these materials in bookshops or museum shops. I have a lot of this ephemera— duplicate copies and rare editions—so around ten years ago, I started giving some of it away as gifts. I’ve probably done this 25 times. In 2014, I ordered 40 copies of a Sunbrella pamphlet about Sheila’s works from the Whitney Biennial and gave a few of them away. Historical documents are interesting and unusual, and they are a delight to share.”