METALSMITH MAGAZINE Vol. 40 No. 1

EXCERPT:

“Sol Mintz worked out of a small storefront on Jeweler’s Row in Philadelphia. He was my grandfather’s jeweler and the singular individual entrusted with his most valuable possessions. Sol was consulted for wedding rings, anniversary gifts, and repairs throughout his life. My parents, a generation later, also adopted a jeweler on the row, from whom they acquired their gold wedding bands. The familial connections to jewelers and the intricate social networks sustained through jewelry in Philadelphia are characteristic of a greater sense of communalism in the city’s craft scene and ecosystem. Jeweler’s Row has continuously operated as a commercial jewelry district since the late 19th century. This trade center, whose business practices haven’t changed a great deal over the last century, has supplied materials and tools to generations of artists whose interests and concerns with the material have evolved dramatically—from the designer-craftsmen of early Philadelphia industrial art schools to artists, professors, and jewelers of the studio craft movement. Today, jewelers from metalsmithing programs at Tyler School of Art and the University of the Arts continue to source raw material from the row and rotate in and out of side hustles doing production work for some of the same historic family-owned jewelry businesses.

Philadelphia’s history as a locus of metalwork, craft, and industrial production is encoded into its very infrastructure and urban genetics. Jeweler’s Row on Sansom street is the nation’s oldest diamond district and the first architectural example of an identical, contiguous rowhouse. It was designed as a speculative housing solution by architect-carpenter Thomas Carstairs for William Sansom between 1800-1802 and this architectural model was later adopted across the burgeoning city to house industrial workers. The rowhouse is the most prominent architectural form in the city and has become iconic of Philadelphia itself. Both my grandfather and his jeweler, Sol, grew up in rowhouses based off of the Carstairs Row model on New Street in Olde City, blocks away from the first United States Mint. 

It was at the US Mint, founded in 1792 in Philadelphia, where the nation’s first currency was pressed into metal form. Renowned Philadelphia-based metalsmith Stacey Lee Webber has become critically known for her bodies of work using American coinage. Her series God Bless America responds to Philadelphia’s blue-collar labor history. In the works, patterned sheets of pennies, which have been meticulously hand cut, are worked into sculptural representations of the adorning elements of Philadelphia rowhomes: ribbons, flags, and sconces. Reflecting on labor and liberty, Webber’s work is also tied to the materiality and symbolic history of Philadelphia’s perhaps best-known metal icon, the Liberty Bell, which is was cast from copper and had to be recast and remolded numerous times after famously cracking through its first use.

Philadelphia was the nation’s first capital and today, it is being reframed as the “Craft Capital.” Its rich, generative ecosystem of universities, galleries, museums, artists, and scholars over time have centered Philadelphia as a significant craft think tank and contributor to the field of metalsmithing. In 1909, master blacksmith Samuel Yellin founded a blacksmithing forge that brought Philadelphia to the fore of handcrafted metalwork in a time of increasing mechanization. In 1876, the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art) was founded and in 1935, Temple University’s Tyler School of Art was established. These universities both housed dedicated metals programs that are still in operation and nationally distinguished. They have each nurtured significant contributors to contemporary jewelry as professors and students.”