The University of the Arts is located in the center of Philadelphia, where a community of artists and an appreciative audience combine to make this a vibrant place to work and live—the best home for crafts in the United States. We are only two hours away by train or bus from New York City, and the same distance to Baltimore, to the south. An hour further is Washington, D.C., and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery of American Craft.
Jewelry/Metals at The University of the Arts is part of Craft & Material Studies within the School of Art, and the College of Art Media and Design. Our innovative curriculum invites students to pick their own courses, work independently, collaborate, cross boundaries, and experiment with new ideas. Late nights in the studio and early mornings in coffee shops create community. Galleries and museums inspire, restaurants and bars entice—they are all part of the fabric of the city. Walk out the front door and you are within the embrace and heart of the city. Our students are quick to respond to the street and bring it back to the studio. Faculty are active makers and mentors, instructing, advising, and counseling students along the way.
In Craft & Material Studies, we teach techniques that have long been associated with silver- and goldsmithing, ceramics, glass, fiber, and woodworking. Additionally, we encourage students to establish an identity through their work, resulting in students making things in any material imaginable—by hand, with digitally assisted processes, or through highly imaginative and inventive means. We celebrate unique moments when students reach beyond what they have been taught and then leap into the unknown through their own innovation.
Caroline Gore, associate professor of Craft & Material Studies
Caroline Gore is an artist currently working in Philadelphia. She recently joined the faculty at The University of the Arts as an associate professor of Craft & Material Studies in The School of Art and College of Art Media and Design. Gore holds a BFA in crafts with a jewelry focus from Virginia Commonwealth University, and her MFA in metal design from East Carolina University. Although her studio practice is rooted in jewelry and metalsmithing, her work varies in media, scale, and implementation—ranging from jewelry to sculptural installations, photography, and large-scale drawings. Her teaching career started in 2001 at Interlochen Arts Academy, a prestigious private arts school in Northern Michigan. In 2004 she joined the faculty of Western Michigan University in the Gwen Frostic School of Art, and she achieved tenure and rank as associate professor in 2010. Institutions such as the Rhode Island School of Design and Cranbrook Academy of Art have invited her as a visiting critic; she also lectures on her work and the work of the jewelry/metals field internationally through conference proceedings and residencies. In 2012, Gore taught a short course at Penland School of Crafts in the mountains of North Carolina, assisting students on locating the core of their research and sustaining meaningful studio practices through an examination of literature, material meaning, and other conceptual strategies.
Gore exhibits her work through galleries and nonprofit spaces; venues have included the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts in Michigan, and various art fairs through New York-based gallery Ornamentum. Her work is also regularly found in print, including Metalsmith magazine, exhibition catalogs, numerous 500 series books published by Lark Books, and it is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Racine Art Museum, and numerous private collections.
In 2009, Gore received a Peter Reed Foundation Grant, and in 2010 the exhibition site: interventions, observations and simulations opened at Lawndale Art Center in Houston, Texas, in conjunction with the Society of North American Goldsmiths conference. The work in this exhibition spanned a multiyear investigation of site and the direct and often indirect relationships we have to place through experience and remembering. In 2012 she was awarded a sabbatical for research from Western Michigan University for the academic year 2012–2013. The exhibition …mercurial silence… was the result of this intense period of time spent in studio, where through research and experimentation she plumbed deeper into material meaning, the histories jewelry and objects hold, and our unique ability to process memory through remembering, forgetting, and transforming. An exhibition catalog with essays by Kerianne Quick, Susie J. Silbert, and an introduction by C. James Meyer is now available as a living document of this body of work.
Rod McCormick, professor of Craft & Material Studies
Rod McCormick is a professor of Craft + Material Studies in the College of Art, Media & Design at the University of the Arts. He received his BFA from Tyler School of Art in 1974, and his MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1978.
Rod is a metalsmith, sculptor, and jeweler. His original passion was for metal (copper, bronze, aluminum, steel, silver, gold) and for metalworking (fabrication, hammering, casting, chasing, repoussé, soldering, welding). Since 1990, he has also been involved with the application of computer-aided design and computer-aided making to the work of the individual craftsperson, and now much of his work is executed using digital processes. He draws his inspiration from process—from 19th-century sheet metal patternmaking as well as contemporary 3D computer modeling programs. His current work is jewelry—sensuous forms designed digitally and 3D-printed.
He has received many honors, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship Grant. He is a three-time finalist (Discipline Winner) for a PEW Fellowship in the Arts. He has lectured at Massachusetts College of Art, State University of New York at New Paltz, Cranbrook Academy, Washington State University, Towson University, and Kendall College of Art and Design, among others.
Exhibitions include solo shows at John Elder Gallery, New York City, and at Drexel University’s Design Arts Gallery, as well as group shows at the American Craft Museum, New York City; Leo Kaplan Modern Gallery, New York City; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York at New Paltz; and Velvet da Vinci gallery, San Francisco.
Mallory Weston, lecturer
Mallory Weston is an artist currently living and working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her undergraduate degree is in crafts with a concentration in jewelry and metalsmithing from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is a recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, with an MFA in jewelry and metalsmithing. She works with a variety of media, including metal, fiber, leather, and textiles, creating bold, compelling, and interactive wearable art. Her work has appeared in several significant exhibitions such as Siamese Connection at Brooklyn Metal Works, Seams Seems at MADA Gallery in Melbourne, Australia, and Suspended in Pink and Suspended in Green, which toured throughout Europe and the United States. She was recently featured at Sienna Patti in Lenox, Massachusetts, as part of their Emerging Artist Platform, and was the recipient of the 2013 Marzee Graduate Prize, awarded during the annual Galerie Marzee International Graduate Jewellery Show. Her work has been published in several notable publications, including 500 Silver Jewelry Designs, by Marthe Le Van and Talya Baharal, and Saturated: Metal and Color, the 2009 Metalsmith magazine Exhibition in Print. In addition to her studio practice, she is currently a lecturer at The University of the Arts. Her work can be found in several diverse and interesting collections, such as the personal collections of comedian Patton Oswalt, science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, and the CODA Museum collection in the Netherlands.
RECENT GRADUATES: If you recently received a degree–BA, BFA, MA, or MFA–from this university, everything you need to know to upload your graduate portfolio can be found at this link.
