While trimming a two-hundred-year-old textured frame to fit an oil painting for a 2012 exhibition at his gallery–meets–antique store, Trace Mayer had a realization: The frame outshone the artwork. One of his assistants joined together the frame’s leftover corners to create a miniature quadrangle, and, inspired, Mayer added a gilded bee he had collected years earlier. “It was an aha moment that felt like fitting in the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle,” he says. Drawing on his background in physics and fine art, Mayer played with forms and contributor Julia Reed) that he began creating them full-time. Today Mayer and his team make original Museum Bees daily, using mostly circa-1860 frames or bourbon barrels to showcase an ornament that they might borrow from, say, a 1960s brooch or an heirloom belt buckle, or design themselves. “There is a level of collaboration going on,” Mayer says. “I’m reimagining an unsung artist’s work from over a century ago.” As an antidote to art-world pretensions, Mayer prices each Bee the same. “That way, the value is in the eye of the buyer, and you’ll pick the piece you love the most—the one that tells a story to you.”
