Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
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46 ORNAMENT 38.1.2015 only after a show in Baltimore later that year put her beyond her goal of three months' worth of new orders. Myers moved back east in 1997, setting up shop in Allentown, Pennsylvania, near where she grew up. "I remember thinking, 'I really wish I was in Philly or New York," she says. "But I had fantastic clients in the Lehigh Valley. I still have wonderful clients there. It was a really great incubator. It was a great place for me to be able to afford to live and work and make what I wanted without worrying too much about it." Myers remained in the Lehigh Valley until 2003. It was there that she met her future husband, Troy Juliar, who was then an editor at the health-and- wellness publisher Rodale Press. When he took a position with Recorded Books, Inc., in Maryland, they moved south and Myers opened a studio and gallery in the quaint village of West Annapolis. In 2005, the couple was married at the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore's spectacular venue for "outsider" art situated just off the Inner Harbor. They now live in Roland Park, just north of the city, and have a son in kindergarten. Since 2009 Myers's studio and gallery have been located at Clipper Mill in Baltimore's Hampden section, nestled between the Johns Hopkins campus and Druid Hill Park. The former site of the Poole & Hunt Iron Works, where steam engines, railroad cars, water- wheels, and other large components of the industrial age were manufactured, Clipper Mill is now home to a dynamic community of artisans and entrepreneurs, including the Corradetti Glass Studio, Gutierrez Studios (custom furniture), Mandala Creations (hand-forged metalwork), and Woodberry Kitchen, rated one of the finest restaurants on the East Coast. "There's a lot of great energy here," says Myers. She points to the "fire pit," a community hangout just outside the restaurant, where a few glassblowers are taking a break around the funnel-shaped fireplace, some fifteen feet high, welded from large scraps of metal and anchored to a circular platform bolted into the ground. "This was built in honor of the former owner of Gutierrez, John Gutierrez, who died," she says. "Everybody in the community pitched in." Across the street, in a sunken area adjacent to the massive old foundry building that now serves as an indoor parking lot, white marble steps lead to a swimming pool surrounded by tall classical columns. "In the summertime, this looks like Vegas," says Myers. "The lanterns at the top of the columns light up, so there's fire coming out of them." If there's such thing as a post-industrial paradise, this comes pretty close to the mark. ASYMMETRICAL CACTUS LEAF EARRINGS of oxidized silver, eighteen karat gold, diamonds, carved, cast, 2014. Photograph by Shannon Partrick.