For this year’s community challenge, the BJC invited artists to create jewelry or personal objects that evoke a sense of place. How artists chose to interpret place may be political and speak of a sense of identity and nationality, may be personal and resonate with a sense of home, or may be associated with memory and imagination.
Participating artists are: Allison Gulick, Anna Melyakova, Banafsheh Hemmati, Carol Allen, Casey Claveria, Connie Alba Ambridge, Elizabeth English, J Taran Diamond, Jeanne Marie Martineau, Kate Connell, Maria Konschake, Mary Fissell, Maura Minter, Megan Obenaus, Melissa Lovingood, Mercury Swift, Meredith W. Gross, Mystery McIlvaine, Navah Langmeyer, Pallavi Verma, Sarah Parker, Seville Marina Meyn Partida, Sophie Maguire, and Vershali Jain.
Postcard Image: Blue Brooch by Vershali Jain, 2023
Exhibition Dates: December 1, 2023 - February 7, 2024 with an opening reception on Friday, December 1st, 2023, 5 - 8pm
Fashion can be a marker of cultural history, tracking historical movements through the lines, patterns, materials, and even hemlines of a garment or an era. Common Threads is an exhibition of jewelry and sculptural objects that were each inspired by an iconic fashion piece. The items used as inspiration are highly notable, whether because of their innovativeness, craftsmanship, or the way in which they are significantly tied to a moment in history.
In her latest series, Emily Culver presents a collection of new works in the form of jewelry, objects, and image configured to mimic intimate places. The works exhibited inhabit an active place of being; somewhere between converging, dissipating and vibrating. Suggestion of these parts and particles in flux populate the forms, imagery, and patterns utilized throughout. By acknowledging these gaps – between inside and outside, matter and void – new space is generated. This new space, like a portal, is one to be gazed into but not through.
JE was started by Kat Cole and Laura Wood in 2012 as a new type of opportunity for early career artists to gain national exposure. Through our diverse network we are able to offer many different exposure and sales opportunities to the jewelers selected for JE. Over the last three years JE has exhibited 18 artists and traveled their work to different locations including galleries, conferences, institutions, and public spaces.
To tempt, to seduce, to bewitch, to entrap, to wink, to flash, to caution, to scream. The duality of Sirens conjures vivid images that can be linked to the powerful capabilities of jewelry. Sirens is a collection of new work from the JV Collective, a group of six female artists based in Philadelphia.
Radical Jewelry Makeover: Baltimore/New Works is an exhibition celebrating the culmination of Radical Jewelry Makeover: Baltimore, a community jewelry mining and recycling project that draws attention to the creativity and skills of local jewelers and designers and encourages people to consider their habits of consumption.
Chromatics is a solo exhibition of works by Lyndsay Rice that demonstrates an interest in ornamentation, structure, texture, and color as bionic augmentation for the body. She creates forms that operate as both signifiers and ornaments, investigating the parallels between plumage and badges, status, sexuality, and honor.
CrossPASS is a project featuring collaborative and solo works by artists Demitra Thomloudis and Motoko Furuhashi that examines place through expanded media and the intimate lens of jewelry and small objects. The project targets a distinctive stretch of the Interstate 10 corridor connecting the unique borderplex region of El Paso, Texas to Las Cruces, New Mexico.
