Join the Baltimore Jewelry Center on February 8th, 2025 for Ornamenta, our annual fundraising event. Every year, Ornamenta provides the BJC with the opportunity to raise much-needed funds while sharing our love of metalsmithing and art jewelry with the broader Baltimore and DMV communities. By attending Ornamenta, bidding in our auction, buying raffle tickets, or by contributing to our fund-a-need, you are directly supporting a range of programs including our residency, workforce development, scholarships, and kids and teens programs.

Ornamenta is a night of celebration that includes dining, dancing, a silent auction, and a raffle. This year we’re excited to continue our fundraising in person while continuing to provide engagement opportunities for the broader jewelry community. This year, we are inspired by Diamonds for our theme!

Buy your ticket by December 31 for an Early Bird Discount of $15!

Join us on November 21st at 6pm for an artist talk by Baltimore-based photographer Joe Giordano! Joe will be giving a talk about his work documenting the collapse of the steel industry both in Baltimore and abroad from the early 2000s until today. He'll also discuss his series wth the Museum of Industry documenting what it means to work today, including images of silversmithing, working oyster boats, and more.

Joseph Mario (J.M.) Giordano is an award-winning photojournalist based in Baltimore and co-host of the photojournalism podcast, 10 Frames Per Second with Molly Roberts. His book, We Used to Live At Night (Culture Crush Editions) chronicles 25 years of the city at night. His work has been featured on NPR, ProPublica, Al-Jazeera, GQ, Architectural Digest, Rolling-Stone, Taste, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, Washington Post, The Baltimore City Paper and many more. His work, from the Struggle Civil Rights series, is in the permanent collections at the Reginald Lewis Museum. This year he was named a finalist for the prestigious National Gallery's Outwin Boochever Portrait Prize and will be featured in American Photography Annual 40 for his second book 13-23 (Nighted Life Press), covering a decade of Baltimore's homicide rate. His international photographs covering the collapse of the steel industry are the subject of a solo show at the Museum of Industry in Baltimore. He is at work on his next book Trumpland (Nighted Life Press), due out in October.

The Baltimore Jewelry Center invites community members near and far to share artworks, artifacts, and anecdotes related to your time with the BJC to help capture our community-sourced history and serve as the foundation for our archive.

The gallery walls will begin blank and over the course of the 6-week project, they will be populated with a collection of artwork, artifacts, and stories submitted by our community. The resulting collection will be a visual celebration of community, learning, and making, which is at the heart of everything we do. Objects, artworks, and stories shared as part of the exhibition will be documented and added to the BJC’s digital archive, where they will be accessible as a resource for future generations of jewelers and metalsmiths.

Submitted work and stories will be displayed in the gallery from December 6th through January 24th with the gallery shifting and changing as new work and stories are added over the two month duration of the show.

The hustle and bustle of the holiday season is right around the corner! As we prepare to spend time with loved ones and enjoy some tasty treats we pause and take stock of all we have to be thankful for in 2024. At the BJC we are particularly grateful to have a community of engaged and supportive students and patrons that have made the BJC their home away from home.

Mark your calendar for Giving Tuesday 2024, December 3rd! 

We're two thirds through our fall session, but we've got a few more spots left in our final Fall Workshop, Natural Object Casting with April Wood.

In this weekend workshop, students will learn the basics of the metal casting process, working quickly and directly with natural objects as models. Metal finishing, basic color methods, and simple jewelry fabrication will be discussed. Students will leave this short class with a variety of cast objects and wearables.

Also keep an eye out for our Winter class lineup, coming soon!

There's only one week left to stop by the gallery to see Shell of Desire, the first American solo exhibition for jewelry artist Ye-jee Lee. Using a press and her extensive collection of commercial jewelry dies from all over the world, Ye-jee Lee transforms mass produced metal components into one of a kind pieces of kinetic jewelry. 

In this exhibition, Ye-Jee lee investigates the the ostentatious nature of jewelry and its potential to serve as symbols of achievement, honor, power, affiliation, money, or education. Lee replicates and rearranges these symbols to create new messages, ideas, and interactions

Shell Of Desire is up in our gallery through November 15. With over 85 unique pieces in the exhibition at price points starting as low as $100, this exhibition is a great place to start a contemporary jewelry collection.