Designed by architects.(Current and coming)(Designed by Architects: Metalwork from the Margo Grant Walsh Collection)

Margo Grant Walsh began collecting silver and metalwork as a respite from the quotidian demands of her high-powered career as a managing principal at the prominent international architecture firm Gensler. The fluky nature of her story may sound familiar to many collectors: in 1981 her team of interior architects was enlisted to design a display case for a seventeenth-century silver tankard in a Wall Street client's office. The object intrigued her, and so on a Sunday afternoon two weeks later she attended a silver auction preview at Sotheby's in New York City. She studied the offerings and bought the sale catalogue, but found most of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century objects not quite to her liking and beyond her budget anyway. Still intrigued, she attended the Fall Antiques Show at the Pier in New York City two weeks later and her life changed.

American arts and crafts silver and jewelry were Grant Walsh's first passion, but she quickly became interested in British silver and metalwork from the period as well. On numerous business trips to London over the years she made use of every spare hour she could find to meet with dealers, attend flea markets and antiques shows, and study the collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum, never missing an opportunity to nurture her growing passion and build her collection. The result is an extraordinary group of silver and metalwork ranging from the late nineteenth century to today that includes arts and crafts objects from the United States, Great Britain, Denmark, Germany, and Austria, as well as later Mexican, Native American, and British ...