Radical Jewelry Makeover

Last year I had the amazing opportunity to work with a project called The Radical Jewelry Makeover (RJM). This project is the brainchild of artists Susie Ganch and Christina Miller. RJM is a part of the non-profit group Ethical Metalsmiths. 

This installment of RJM was hosted by The Visual Arts Center of Richmond. RJM RVA was the ninth installment of this program. From January to June of 2014 the Richmond VA community was a home to RJM.

The project invites a community to "mine their jewelry boxes" and donate items that are no longer worn. The donations are then sorted. Jewelers are given a stash of discarded jewels along with the challenge to create a new piece, one that will be worn. That may mean the work transforms in aesthetic value or simply trades out some emotional value. 

Folks donated pounds upon pounds of unwanted baubles and bling things. All of the donations were sorted at Virginia Commonwealth University. Teams of professional jewelers and metalsmithing students worked together to document and sort all the pieces that came in. Students (and myself) learned how to test metals for purity and to read makers marks.

Once all of the materials had been distributed to participating artists they only had 6 weeks to recreate a piece of wearable art. Some pieces were melted down into ingots, gems were reset, items were sawed & soldered, and all the while I could hear Susie asking “Is glue necessary?’

Finally in an Exhibition at the True F. Luck Gallery at The Visual Arts Center of Richmond, over 200 reworked pieces of jewelry were back on the market. Until this point I had been hands off in the making experience and hands on in the field of wrangling.

Once the show opened, I was ecstatic to be asked by The Visual Art Center to help them with their Engage gallery education program. For me this was the most rewarding aspect of the program. I was able to work with both children and senior citizens as students. What is disposable fashion? Where do a jeweler's raw materials come from? What consequences come with obtaining said raw material? Not only is there a lot to talk about but skills to learn and tools to grab on to. The stories that came out of digging through the discarded jewelry were priceless. I may have received a better education on the meaning of jewelry than the students did.

So Thank you a million times over Susie, Christina, Caroline Cobb-Wright, Ethical Metalsmiths, and VisArts!