NEW YORK — Walk along Orchard Street in Manhattan too quickly and one could miss Occulter, a sliver of a store at No. 83 1/2.
That would be a shame because the 100-square-foot shop, which bowed this month on the Lower East Side, features highly unusual jewelry and objects.
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Derrick Cruz, who has a degree in painting from East Carolina University, shapes rare natural or repurposed materials such as vintage ivory piano keys, mammoth fossil ivory and horse hair into necklaces and bracelets for the company he founded, Black Sheep & Prodigal Sons. Occulter sells Black Sheep merchandise and items specially designed for the store.
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Cruz, who uses endangered technologies and traditions to craft his work, won the 2007 Gen Art Styles Design Vision Award for Accessories and was a semifinalist for the 2009 Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation Award.
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As for the name Occulter, Cruz said its a bit misleading. “Occulter sounds like the occult,” he said. “An occulter is an instrument used to block the view of a bright celestial object allowing the careful observation of a fainter one.”
The store holds plenty of mystery, nonetheless. Cruz is obsessed with the potential beauty found in darkness and also finds inspiration in funerary crafts, alchemical studies and Native American mythology.
“One thing that led me to take the route I did was the idea of making very personal objects and things that are hard to replicate by a machine,” he said. “We want to make things that prove that the human hand is more capable than a machine. We find materials that are scarce and salvaged and would make no sense for mass production because the irregularity of everything. When you create things with unusual materials there’s this childlike moment that occurs. When you present someone with something like this, the recipient has a sense of wonder.”
Among the most novel objects are an 18-karat gold honeycomb pendant on a fine gold chain at $2,000 is both a conversation piece and political statement inspired by the alarming disappearance of honeybees, a horse hair bangle bracelet with leather at $385 and a golden jaw that is a replica of a large human jaw that’s made of 24-karat gold over solid brass with a natural black diamond at $2,400 and can be used as an ashtray or to hold small objects. Cruz also creates scrimshaw on vintage piano ivory for pendants that start at $685, and commissions in the same format starting at $1,000.
Cruz plans to introduce new collections and collaborations with other eclectic New York talents, starting with Bryan Collins, who created the album cover design for School of Seven Bells.