Sterling Collar Necklace

A sterling collar, often hinged and set with no stone, is one of the core Sigi Pineda forms, a close-fitting band that depends entirely on the shaping of the silver around the neck. The collar recurs across his work, a silhouette he returned to as a defining shape.

Sigi's grounding was in the Taxco school's best workshops. Morrill places him among the silversmiths in Margot van Voorhies Carr's atelier, where he oversaw the enamelers for four years before opening his own shop in the mid-1950s (Morrill, p. 168). The hinged sterling collar belongs to the independent line he developed afterward.

That line later turned, in Morrill's account, toward die-cast production to make it less expensive to manufacture (p. 250). For a collector, a Sigi collar is among his most recognizable forms, modernist structure in silver worn snug at the throat.

Status of this record: as it stands this is a description of a Sigi Pineda type, not a defensible record of a specific work. The title is generic, one photograph is held, and there are no dimensions, no hallmark photograph, no design number and no object-specific description — the note above characterises the collar form in general terms rather than the object in front of the camera. Three things are needed before it can be treated as a catalogued object: a photograph of the hallmark, a design number, and a description written from this example, with measurements.

Until those are supplied the record should not be carried as a canonical entry, and it is flagged here for demotion out of the canon pending that evidence.

The Date field previously read "1956-present," which is a workshop span rather than a date for an object. It has been replaced with "date unknown"; Sigi Pineda opened his own shop in the mid-1950s after four years overseeing the enamelers in Margot van Voorhies Carr's atelier (Morrill, p. 168), so the mid-1950s is the earliest plausible bound, but the object itself cannot be dated without its mark.