Ornament Magazine

VOL38.1 2015

Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.

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44 ORNAMENT 38.1.2015 later career) and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Even after they relocated to the more rural Lehigh Valley, some sixty miles north of the city, Myers still felt connected to the larger world of art. It was the 1980s, and artists like Keith Haring and Jeff Koons, both of whom hailed from nearby towns, were making a big splash in New York. "There was a connection to people in Pennsylvania who had actually crossed the line into the big art world in New York, and that was a huge inspiration to me," she says. While still in junior high school, Myers earned a scholarship to take classes at the Allentown Museum of Art's Baum School. "I had some really cool teachers there," she recalls. "They were working artists, and they were also people who let me know what was going on." She credits them with instilling in her the idea that "just because you don't live in New York or Philadelphia doesn't mean that you can't do this." She also studied with a local artist named Myron Barnstone. "He has a really intense program for high schoolers and professionals on drafting and rendering. It's all very classical—the Golden Section," she says. By the time she graduated high school, Myers had an extensive portfolio of two-dimensional works, on the strength of which she was admitted to Temple University's Tyler School of Art. The shift toward jewelry came during her second year at Tyler. "In sophomore year they make you take bees," she says. "Beekeeping is a prescient issue these days. I have a client who is a beekeeper. She tells me stories of hives failing and how delicate a balance it is to keep a healthy hive." For Myers, the bees serve as a reminder of "our need to appreciate and care for the natural world and our connection to/dependence on it." Myers credits her deepening appreciation for the natural world with opening her work over the past decade. Before the Corcovado trip, she says, "the work was very tight—it was very geometric, because the inlay process really demanded that. It wouldn't allow me to be organic in my approach." These earlier designs often featured alternating bands of gold and silver or platinum, with one metal either overlaid on the other or inlaid into channels cut into the mold, a technique Myers developed on her own. She still deploys these skills to great advantage, but her work has literally branched out in recent years, as she continues to incorporate forms from the natural world into her repertoire. For Myers, the artistic journey began early and has proceeded without interruption. "I remember my parents and teachers asking me what I wanted to be, and I always said I wanted to be an artist," she recalls. The family started out in Philadelphia, where her father was a journalist for the Jewelers' Circular Keystone (a trade publication, and, it turns out, harbinger of her POD EARRINGS of oxidized silver, twenty-four karat gold, eighteen karat gold, diamonds, 2014. Photograph by Julieta Rivarola. NATURAL GRAY DIAMOND RING of platinum, eighteen karat gold, diamonds, rough diamond, 2014. Photograph by Shannon Partrick.

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