A sinuous necklace of sterling silver and semi-precious stones, made around 1958 by modernist jeweler Art Smith (1917 – 1982), is among the treasures of the renowned Daphne Farago Collection of studio jewelry at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Born in Cuba to Jamaican parents, Smith grew up in Brooklyn, studied art at Cooper Union, and had his own shop in Greenwich Village from the late ’40s to 1979. He was part of a community of black artists that included writer James Baldwin, singers Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte, musician and Duke Ellington collaborator Billy Strayhorn, and dancer/choreographer Talley Beatty.

Along with elegant, wearable designs seen in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, he created stage jewelry for black avant-garde dance companies – work that likely inspired his “sense of theatricality and interest in the relationship of jewelry to the wearer’s body,” writes Kelly L’Ecuyer, a decorative arts curator at the museum. “Influenced by such prevailing art movements as constructivism, surrealism, and biomorphism, Smith developed an individual style by incorporating in his jewelry the large scale of East African dance regalia, the rhythms of jazz music, and the movement of contemporary African American dance.”

The necklace is one of 150-plus works highlighted in the museum’s lavishly illustrated book on the Farago Collection, Jewelry by Artists (2010).