How Vacheron Constantin and The Met Are Reimagining the Boundaries of Craft
A joint Artisan Residency Program celebrates three extraordinary works by furniture maker Aspen Golann, ceramicist Ibrahim Said, and goldsmith Joy Bonfield-Colombrara
Beneath the soaring sandstone facade of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur, the intersection of traditional craftsmanship and trailblazing contemporary vision took center stage. On October 8, the New York evening marked the culmination of Vacheron Constantin and the Met’s inaugural Artisan Residency Program, celebrating three extraordinary works created over 18 months: Vessel, a monumental carved wooden sculpture by American furniture maker Aspen Golann; Shaping Time, a three-tiered lacquered ceramic structure by Egyptian-American ceramicist Ibrahim Said; and Ruined Splendour—Bronze Diadem, a patinated bronze coronet by British-Italian goldsmith Joy Bonfield-Colombara. While both institutions act as guardians of cultural legacy, their shared priority is pushing the boundaries of savoir-faire into the future, and that ethos was on full display.
Established in May 2025, the 18-month mentorship invited the three artists to delve into The Met’s extensive collection and collaborate directly with master artisans at Vacheron Constantin’s historic workshops in Geneva. The project deepens an ongoing relationship first formed in 2023 between the Swiss manufacture and the museum, which has led to such projects as A Masterpiece on the Wrist series. For Vacheron Constantin, the world’s oldest watchmaker in continuous operation, passing down technical skill is a key mission, rooted in Jean-Marc Vacheron’s very first apprenticeship contract in 1755. The house continues to build institutional partnerships around the world, and it has worked with the Musée du Louvre in 2019 and Beijing’s Educational Institute of the Palace Museum in 2024.
“This artisan residency program is a collaborative initiative that embodies our mutual commitment to supporting artistic innovation and cultural dialogue,” says Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “It is a thrill to see how the three artisans, inspired by their engagement with the Met collection and Vacheron Constantin, have created works that breathe new life into traditional techniques, powerfully connecting the past and present.”
Christian Selmoni, style and heritage director at Vacheron Constantin, says: “Craft isn’t about replicating the past. It’s very much about using creativity and innovation to make your creation relevant in the world in which we are living today. That opens our minds, gives ideas for the future, and creates a real exchange.”
For the Egyptian-American ceramicist Ibrahim Said, spending time in the Met’s Egyptian and Islamic galleries provided a direct emotional connection to his roots. “To be in the Met with all this collection, especially in the Egyptian or Islamic wing, I feel like I’m back in Egypt,” Said says. “The only time you feel you’re back home is to be in a museum.”
Drawn to the museum’s collection of Ancient Egyptian lentoid bottles—5-to-8-inch ceremonial vessels given as New Year’s gifts—as well as Tutankhamun’s floral collar, Princess Sithathoryunet’s necklace, and a 10th-century water filter, Said set out to reimagine historic geometry with his own unique artistic language. The four-and-a-half-foot-tall, three-tiered lacquered ceramic sculpture, Shaping Time, masterfully reinterprets Vacheron Constantin’s Maltese Cross emblem.
“Shaping Time is about the time we live now, and the time afterlife—which I believe in as religion, and also in Ancient Egyptian living. You can’t separate tradition and innovation,” says Said. “They have to be together.”
Ruined Splendour – Bronze Diadem by Joy Bonfield-Colombara, who has a degree in chemistry as well as classical Florentine jewelry making and goldsmithing, explores the tension between natural decay and human destruction.
Drawing inspiration from an ancient Carpathian copper tiara, 4th-century BC Greek seed-pendant gold necklaces, and an unfinished winter forest painting by Théodore Rousseau, Bonfield-Colombara created a custom bronze alloy using silver instead of lead or arsenic to preserve malleability, alongside a 60 percent gold alloy. Over the course of the residency, she fused over 2,000 individual links into intricate chains.
“Some days it was incredible—I put on an audiobook and stayed at my bench and worked on it, which was great,” she recalls. “Some days, things didn’t work. The links broke; it was frustrating. But the way I felt during the process is the way artisans have felt since the beginning of time.”
During her time in Geneva, Bonfield-Colombara enjoyed the experience working with Vacheron Constantin’s master guillocheur. After receiving custom-engraved gold bramble petals, she intentionally oxidized, hammered, and heat-shaped them to distort their geometry, before piercing the diadem with cold, machine-made steel rods.
“Vacheron is so perfect—everything is catered to perfection,” she says. “I arrived there with my gold discs and he asked, ‘Do you want me to engrave these?’ I told him I was going to hammer them and heat them up. It was a leap of faith on his part, but learning how to let go through my art is where the magic happens.”
American furniture maker and RISD teacher Aspen Golann also took on a radical departure from convention. Founder of The Chairmaker’s Toolbox, an initiative dedicated to equity in woodworking, Golann created Vessel, a mammoth 5-foot-tall wooden vase made from riven, steam-bent, and bent-laminated staves of wood using traditional cooperage and barrel-making methods.
The vessel’s surface is adorned with bas-relief carvings depicting foliage, fruit, horses, and whimsical forms and it draws from 17th-to-19th-century New England blanket chests, strapwork carvings, and embroideries. Composed of roughly 10,000 individual pieces, the vessel took her six months and many samples to get the final result.
For Golann, observing Vacheron Constantin’s artisans in Geneva, where the craftsmen dedicate months to training and experimental work, was her favorite part of the process. “At the highest levels of furniture, the skill serves nothing more than being a monument to itself, where people are proving through technical expertise that their work has value,” Golann says. “The sheer labor cannot in and of itself define the value of the work. The work has to simultaneously exist at the peak of its technical possibility while also still having a sense of humanity, joy, and improvisation. Seeing that unrestrained pursuit of perfection in Geneva—and knowing that you’re not the only one out on a limb—allowed me to go back home and spend six months making samples and burning them in so many fires.”
“To innovate comes from a root word that means ‘to renew’ or ‘to make new,’ says Heidi Holder, the Frederick P. and Sandra P. Rose Chair of Education. “It doesn’t necessarily mean to start from the very beginning, to destroy and start again. How do you renew what you have so it appears new?”
The result of that 18-month journey was also a special bond between the makers. “There’s a type of isolation that people don’t talk about very often,” Bonfield-Colombara shares. “To suddenly be in a space with two other people who are experiencing the exact same thing, and to not have to apologize for how hard you work and how much you push, was amazing.”
“We’re in the decade of craft,” Holder concludes. “There is a tectonic plate shifting back to this notion of making.” By bringing together the museum’s historic collection, the specialized crafts of the master watchmakers, and contemporary makers, Vacheron Constantin and the Met are celebrating that craft is a dynamic, living language that is always being rewritten.