Baltimore and Pittsburgh were both forged in the American Industrial Revolution, producing steel, textiles, and coal. Today both cities are finding their way towards post-industrial futures; health care and education play outsized economic roles in each. Both gritty cities are characterized by a strong neighborhood feeling. Both are mixes of nineteenth-century industrial architecture, dotted with mansions once owned by industrial leaders, such as Hackerman House (Baltimore) and the Frick House (Pittsburgh). Baltimore has its iconic Bromo-Seltzer Tower while Pittsburgh enjoys the Heinz Factory, both elaborate structures from the cities’ manufacturing pasts, now re-purposed. Cities of Steel Cities of Rust is an exhibition conceived and organized by Mary Fissell and Courtney Powell.

The Implement Archive

The Implement Archive is an evolving collaborative exploration of hand tools, utensils and other pieces of equipment used for a particular purpose between visual artists Ellen Kleckner and Linda Tien. Applying an intuitive consideration to the familiar visual vocabulary established by a lineage of makers, through process, and material, the archive calls question to the commonplace or the recognizable through the investigation of form, textures and composition. Through altering familiar materials and forms, the archive acts as a documentation to share the evolution of utility, format, function and maker through the employment of cooperative play and exploration paired with traditional practice and material. The collaboration is not only an example of how traditional materials are combined in a contemporary investigation, but also how two makers negotiate the synthesis of different elements.

What can be seen in the objects we keep? What can be said of the objects we discard? i found you is a solo exhibition of works by Jessica Andersen. To create the work in this exhibition, Jessica sourced materials from estate sales, auctions, garage sales, and junk drawers. Objects found and stories collected; some invented, inherited, or bought. A favorite spoon, a paddle, an old toy. I found you and what new stories do you have to tell?

In United, artist Shani Richards asks can a person take back an offensive/taboo word and make it their own? Richards is fascinated with how people use jewelry, body modifications, shoes, and clothing to convey their race, social status, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, and class. She is incensed and inspired by the word N-i-g-g-e-r, and how the black community years ago decided to take the N-word back. United is an exhibition of pendants featuring racial and ethnic slurs, sexual orientations, gender pronouns, and more. Richard’s goal for the exhibition is that by revealing a rainbow of slurs, people will see themselves reflected somewhere in it and maybe gain a greater understanding of the power of the N-word. The art relies on audience participation and conversation. Throughout the exhibition, viewers will be invited to wear the pendant of their choice. Selfies posted on social media are encouraged so the conversation can spread out beyond the community.

Potential Space: new works by Rebekah Frank

Potential Space: new works by Rebekah Frank is the culmination of a one-month Mid-Career Professional residency at the BJC. The work created during the residency is an exploration of graduated chain as a building block to create volumetric forms.The chain creates collapsible shapes, which are flexible and changeable as they are worn. The structures are minimal, spacious, without complexity. Despite the geometry and material, they are not hard pieces. Softness enters the pieces as they drape and conform to the environment they interact with, the gentle pull of gravity, the planar surfaces of a table, the curves of the body. There is a delicacy in the line and in the structure, but these flexible perimeters create their own spaces, capturing a moment within their curves and edges. These potential spaces are a place for further investigation.

a solo exhibition by jewelry artist Kristin Beeler

Kristin’ Beeler’s practice includes contemporary jewelry that focuses on stories told by the skin. Archive of Rag and Bone is iterative, multi-media portraiture drawn from the repair marks of traumatic scarring, currently of eight subjects. Beeler’s intention is that the work will lead audiences to complex conversations about compassion. Within the exhibition, narratives are told through photographs, embroidered Tyvek garments, book folios in vellum, and dimensional objects in charcoal: materials chosen to contrast polarities. Structures are drawn from local flora, wind maps and charts used for navigating sea currents that cannot be seen, only felt through experience.

Guidelines Volume 2 explores how learning, inspiration, and aesthetic growth takes place outside of a traditional academic environment & is an ongoing process. The Guidelines Project was started in 2019 by artist and curator Brie Flora. As a semi-recent graduate, Brie was interested in exploring how artists find and maintain inspiration. When you are out of college, whether it be an undergraduate or masters program, you are no longer driven by given guidelines. How do you create work? What do you create? In this exhibition artists were asked to look at an older piece of work and remake it, exaggerating and expanding on things that they might want to change.

Computer aided technology is no longer new. Over the past several decades, industry professionals and artists alike have explored and expanded digital technology, developing the tools and materials available to create a visual language built in the virtual sphere. In Handmade Hacking we ask what happens when the maker is interested in using the technology not as an end but as a means to push beyond the software? What happens when the artist moves deftly from handmade to digital and back again, blurring the distinctions between the
methods of making? How many stages or degrees of separation might exist from design to outcome?

Jewelry Edition is a platform for sharing and celebrating contemporary jewelry, started by Kat Cole and Laura Wood in 2012. The project began as a catalyst to provide emerging jewelers more visibility and as a means to explore new ways of sharing this art form with a diverse audience.

One of the most fascinating things about studying mathematics is how something so simple, like a line, can become increasingly complex and beautiful with just a few shifts in perspective and direction. Reed Fagan’s solo exhibition Space Filling is a visual investigation into an obscure field of mathematics that was pioneered by Giuseppe Peano. Space filling curves prove the idea that something with no width but infinite length could in fact fill a space in a very efficient manner.

On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean are ‘Western’ cultures. If jewelry is considered a form of communication, do people speak the same language on either side of the Atlantic? Site Effects aims to shed a light on two questions: Have these differences been blurred in our era of globalization or do they still exist? To what extent does one only perceive a difference because knowledge of an artist’s name and location results in cultural stereotyping?

In psychology, object permanence refers to the understanding that objects continue to exist independent of ourselves, even when they are not able to be perceived. Within that construct, an object may evolve and change, from whole to broken, lost to found, or even exist simultaneously as more than one thing. The material reality of the object might be different than what is expected or visually understood. In Object Permanence we ask how does our perception of an object change as we observe and study it? And how does our perception of the object inform the truth of the object itself?

In Proposed Excavation, a solo exhibition by Demi Thomloudis, systems, colors, forms and marks are observed and excavated from the built environment and reorganized in a new system to now inhabit the space on the body as ornament. Roles have been reversed. Now, instead of our bodies moving in and around the space, the language of these spaces occupies the intimate landscape of the body. Thomloudis intends to challenge the construct of jewelry as a means to examine value, material sign systems and extensions of identity through the lens of place. Her jewelry is a means to connect us closer to the world we are surrounded by.