If you’re expecting strands of delicate pearls, Jewelry of Ideas, on view at the Cooper Hewitt Museum, will be a bit disorienting. The exhibition was prompted by the gift of 150 avant-garde pieces representing the evolution of conceptual and materials-driven jewelry design from the mid-20th century to the present. The donor? Susan Grant Lewin, president of the eponymous New York-based communications firm and wearer of extraordinary jewelry.

The exhibition packs a lot of very bold statements into two small rooms, though it is organized into clear themes such as Dutch Pioneers, Painterly Jewelry, and Memory and Remembrance. Highlights include Annamaria Zanella’s relatively approachable “silk necklace” (made from loops of gold with enamel), which successfully emulates the fabric’s fluid movement, and a “Nature” section where contemporary work reminds us exactly how modern the concept of jewelry is not. Looking around the room, there are intricate circles of paper, beech wood and 3D-printed glass-filled nylon that one can imagine wearing. But with pieces that address such diverse concepts as decay, racism and kinetics, it should come as no surprise that many items aren’t obviously wearable, including a postcard and a pincushion (both are brooches, for the record).

The museum does succeed in making these conceptual art pieces more approachable to the public via short, history-focused explanations, though the biggest triumph is simply exposing and lauding diverse, impactful challenges to our idea of what a word like “jewelry” can mean.

Jewelry of Ideas: Gifts from the Susan Grant Lewin Collection is on view at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum through May 28, 2018.