Later this year the Society of North American Goldsmiths will hold its annual convention in Houston. That event inspired curator Emily Sloan to put together this small show of distinctly non-precious jewelry at Gallery 1724, the funky hair salon/art gallery hybrid on Bissonnet.

“Not the Family Jewels!” explores the modern practice of craft. You can see a lot of these artists at the Center for Contemporary Craft or Goldesberry Gallery (both excellent institutions), but rarely quite the way you see them here. For example, one of the pieces is a videotaped performance, "The Gospel According to Craft" by Gabriel Craig. Craig, dressed in dark clothes and standing on a wooden box, accosts passers-by, asking if they have accepted craft into their life. The reactions are confused, but often, once the people he’s addressing understand his point, they tell him about the crafts they like to do.

Craig collaborated with Amy Weiks on Eco-Gems, which at least has a conceptual relationship to jewelry. But the “gems” in this piece are made of clay, compost, and seeds, molded into faceted gem shapes. Viewers are invited to take one, and presumably they can be planted. Once you take one, the question becomes—do you plant it? Or do you keep it on a shelf as an art object? (The fact that is free makes it easier to go ahead and plant it. But what if Craig and Weeks were charging $10? $100? More?)

Photo by Robert Boyd

That said, there are plenty of actual pieces of jewelry in the show. Edward McCartney created a necklace made of bobbers (called Fishing Necklace). The little spheres, bisected with red on one side and white on the other, make a rather large, attractive piece of neckwear, though probably too bulky to be practical. German artist Katja Korsawe’s necklace, made of twisted rubber bands, is likewise impractical; the rubber will harden and become brittle. But it looks great: red and knobby and textured.

Photo by Robert Boyd

The curious Eskimo Kissers by Gary Schott look like colorful felt-covered pacifiers. It is hard to know whether they are meant to be jewelry or tiny sculptural objects. Ultimately, that is what this entire show is asking. It’s a question that gets to the heart of the fuzzy boundary between art and craft.

In recent years, there has been a movement to recognize craft as a category overlapping with fine art (as it most certainly was back in the Renaissance when Benvenuto Cellini was creating his staggering gold pieces and writing his proud, action-packed, self-justifying autobiography). These artists are in a sense modern Cellinis—Cellinis in the age of assemblage, performance and conceptual art.

“Not the Family Jewels!” runs through March 14, with a closing reception on March 11.