Riga Museum Launches Spectrum Series, Spotlighting Latvian Jewelry Art in 2026

Four chapters. Four titles: Artist's Signature, Beautiful Nature, Architecture of Lines, Noise. That is the shape of Spectrum, a new pop-up exhibition series that the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Riga launched this week in partnership with the Latvian Jewelry Art Association, positioning Latvian jewelry art as a living discipline rather than a showcase genre.

The museum, working in co-operation with the Latvian Jewelry Art Association, launched Spectrum with its first instalment, Artist's Signature, which opened on 25 March and won the partnership a foundation of credibility built on real curatorial track record. The exhibition runs through 31 May 2026 at Skārņu iela 10, Riga, integrated directly into the museum's permanent third-floor exhibition, Design Process, which tells the story of Latvian design from the 1960s until now.

The Spectrum programme frames jewelry not as decorative supplement but as primary cultural text. The Latvian Public Media Award in Culture "Kilograms Kultūras 2024" in the category "Visual Art" was awarded to the exhibition "Touch-Sensitive" by the Latvian Jewellery Art Association, with curators Ginta Grūbe and Zane Vilka. That prize is the credential the Spectrum series inherits: a collaboration that already proved it could win the country's most prominent cultural media award is now expanding into a sustained, year-round programme.

The backstory matters here. From 8 February to 21 April 2024, Touch-Sensitive brought together the works of 23 authors, revealed in relation to the owners of jewellery, demonstrating a wide range of individual creative stylistics of different generations of artists and emphasizing the development and succession of the industry. The exhibition then travelled to Lithuania, where it was presented in the spring of 2025 by the Decorative Arts and Design Museum of the Latvian National Museum of Art. Specifically, it was open from 11 April through 30 June at the Museum of Applied Arts and Design in Vilnius. An exhibition that began as a single Riga show crossed a national border and came home with an award. Spectrum is the institutional response: a framework designed to sustain that momentum.

The Kilograms kultūras 2024 prizes were awarded on Saturday, 15 February, across ten categories, with the Visual Art prize going to Touch-Sensitive, curated by Ginta Grūbe and Zane Vilka. Their names do not yet appear in the announced details for Spectrum's Artist's Signature instalment; the full roster of participating artists for the new series has not been confirmed by the museum at this stage.

What is clear is the curatorial logic of the four titles. Artist's Signature opens the year with questions of authorship and individual voice. Beautiful Nature and Architecture of Lines follow, suggesting a movement from the organic to the structural. Noise, the year's final instalment, plants a deliberate provocation at the end of the sequence. Each pop-up is designed to integrate into Design Process rather than disrupt it, adding a layer of contemporary jewelry dialogue to a permanent collection that already spans six decades of Latvian design thinking.

The Museum of Decorative Arts and Design holds the largest collection of professional decorative art and design in Latvia, with more than 11,928 items in its collection, around 500 of which are on display at any time. The museum is housed in the former St. George's Church building, dating to 1204, which is the oldest stone building in Riga. Jewelry presented inside a medieval church turned design institution, reframed four times across a calendar year: that is Spectrum's real proposition, and it opens now.