Paula Crevoshay

As a student, Paula worked in a very wide variety of media. She did whole room installations and won awards for video before earning a master’s degree with Honors in Painting and Sculpture at 22. Paula then went to New York to launch her career as an artist, securing an invitation for a one-woman show at the famous Mary Boone Gallery.

Soon, George Crevoshay, a Ph.D. candidate in Asian studies whom she had met at the University, came wooing her for his wife. George had been awarded both a Fulbright Scholarship and an American Institute of Indian Studies grant to be paid back-to-back over a period of four years.

Paula forwent the Manhattan exhibition and spent the first four years of her married life living in India in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery studying with His Holiness the Dali Lama’s teachers, while George worked on his thesis and translated ancient holy texts from Sanskrit into Tibetan among other scholarly pursuits.

Paula had one-woman shows of her work in Bombay and Pune, worked as an actress in Bollywood films, and set up a dispensary in the monastery, all the while serving the social functions of the wife of a Fulbright Scholar. The British Council for the Arts purchased five paintings for their collection from her Bombay show “Won’t You Pull My Leg,” which opened at the prestigious Jehangir Art Gallery in 1980.

In her master’s thesis, Paula maintained that to create great art, it is necessary to understand and master the disciplines underlying the work. In jewelry, she found a medium that combined them all!

She could work with art and art history, culture and symbolism, metallurgy, and technique. With gemstones, we have geography, geology, mineralogy, and the physics of light. As a fine artist, Crevoshay finds all of nature, history, and human experience are open to her expression, working with the most durable of all materials as her medium.

From the start, Paula began to win patrons and recognition, and her career blossomed. In addition to special exhibitions, her work is now on permanent display in museums such as the GIA Museum, Carnegie Museum, and the National Gem Collection at the Smithsonian Institution. Her first European exhibition was at the Musee de Mineralogie in Paris. The Paris show was very successful; people flew in from as far away as India and Hong Kong to see the show. The museum asked to extend the exhibition for two months due to its popularity. Her most recent exhibitions were at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles in 2018–2019 and the Perot Museum in Dallas in 2021–2022.

Crevoshay has gained renown not only for the graceful beauty and opulent design of her jewels but especially for her painterly approach to gemstone combinations, which is why critics have referred to her as “The Queen of Color.”