In a CoMA (conference)

This week I am heading north to Denver and Loveland, Colorado. I have the honor of teaching a pre-conference workshop and then presenting at the Colorado Metalsmithing Association (CoMA) Conference. I will be in the company of some really talented people. Other speakers include Pat Pruitt, Haley Bates, and Andy Cooperman. I am also looking forward to seeing a lot of friends and making even more. It does my soul good to spend time with my metalsmithing community.

The workshop is Stitch and Dip. We will create volumetric forms by sewing together very thin copper sheet and stabilizing it by applying liquid enamel. I never know exactly what people are going to do with this technique and the results always open my mind to more possibilities.

My conference presentation is going to be a standard artist’s talk followed by a quick demo of the workshop techniques. There are day passes if people cannot make it to the whole weekend, and many other fun side activities planned (Trivia Night!).

Forging the future 2025 conference logo in distressed font

"Health in Enamel" Quilt tiles fundraiser

Tiles from the award-winning Health in Enamel exhibition will be available for purchase next week. Starting Sunday, July 7, the Metal Museum will host a four-week fundraiser. 

The exhibition explored health, healing, and spirituality, anchored by Valley and Shadow, a twelve-panel series by the late Martha Banyas reflecting on her journey with cancer. The accompanying enamel quilt was created by artists worldwide, many of whom were inspired by Martha and honored their connection to her through their work.​

All proceeds support the creation of the new Fine Metals Studio at Overton Park, expanding opportunities for artists and students. By purchasing a tile, you help shape the future of the Metal Museum.

Here's how it will work: each Sunday, any unsold tiles will be marked down. The sale ends on August 3, or until all tiles are sold. Please remember that every tile is unique, and once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Tile Pricing Schedule:

🗓️ Week 1: July 7 – July 13 — $500 per tile

🗓️ Week 2: July 14 – July 20 — $250 per tile

🗓️ Week 3: July 21 – July 27 — $100 per tile

🗓️ Week 4: July 28 – August 3 — $50 per tile

Rocks Don’t Die, 4 x 4”, 2024, copper with laser etching and liquid vitreous enamel

This is your chance to own “Rocks Don’t Die” or any of the other beautiful tiles by artists such as Harlan Butt, Jan Harrell, Jeanie Pratt, Judy Stone, and the list goes on and on.

You can read more about Rocks Don’t Die here.

I went to Japan

I am investigating the space between cloisonné enamel and reduction printing and what better place for inspiration than a country that excels at both? I started in Tokyo for two days then joined a craft-oriented small group tour that was excellent. Kyoto was our base, but we journeyed extensively. Creative fruits will develop in time, but for now, here are some snapshots…

Snapshots of Japan.

Lets hang out!

I love spending time with my metalsmithing community. I love learning from them and sharing what I know. I love that we geek out over things together like fire and tools and processes. I consider it an extraordinary honor when I am invited to participate in such events and share my flavor of crazy.

This summer I have two such opportunities, and I invite you to consider coming along for the ride…

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June 22 - 28 at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts

Join me for a week of play in the foothills of the Smokey Mountains this summer as I lead the Mad Scientist's Enameling Studio workshop at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts! In this workshop, students will learn to create dimensional forms in sewn copper foil. Using liquid white enamel as a base, they will experiment with additives to achieve a variety of colors, textures, and finishes: ceramic stains will be employed for color effects; the addition of CMC will allow for dimensional extrusions to create enamel “Puffy Paint”; Silver nitrate fired with raku will generate metallic effects; and MAP gas post-firing coloration will create selective surface enhancement. The emphasis is on creative play and exploration. No prior enameling experience required.

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July 15 - 17 Colorado Metalsmithing Associate Pre-Conference Workshop in Denver

Stitch and dip! Using paper pattern-making techniques and cold connections, students will construct volumetric forms from copper foil. We will then add liquid enamel that may be used to both strengthen and decorate. The immediacy of this technique provides a means of quick, dimensional construction for those who may not have access to forming tools.

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The Arrowmont workshop is longer, a little pricier, and includes more information about color and surface effects with liquid enamel. Each starts with sewing copper foil and stabilizing with liquid enamel. They both include an structor with purple bangs at no extra charge.

Artist holding a white sphere made of sewn and enameled copper.

Bolos on the Move and in the News

As I type this, Everybody’s Bolos is being installed at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton Massachusetts. I co-curated this exhibition of bolo ties with Brian Fleetwood and Hannah Toussaint which opened at UNT and is now traveling (you can read the project backstory here). We also produced a catalog and symposium. Maybe a broadway musical is next?

If you are in the area, please come out to the Fuller on Saturday February 1 from 2-5 for the reception. Brian and I will be talking about the background of the exhibition and our research into the fascinating, liminal bolo tie during at public presentation at 3:30.

To whet your appetite, you can read a wonderful article by Andrea Valluzzo that just appeared in Antiques and the Arts Weekly.

Pewter: a most misunderstood metal

About a year ago the editor of Metalsmith reached out about doing an article on pewter. There seemed to be an uptick in the creative use of this metal. It sounded like a fun project so I agreed to write an article. I did research, I asked around, I networked. Many talented people were generous with their time. I also did a ton of historical research. At the end of the day I had to cut over half of it out and we still went over the proscribed word count. But I am happy with what remained as a snapshot of this metal and the contemporary attitudes that surround it.

The Art Students League of Denver is getting vent-y!

Three of my pieces were chosen for inclusion in METALmorphosis: The Art of Transformation. The exhibition is a collaboration between the Colorado Metalsmithing Association and the Art Students League of Denver. Juror Andy Cooperman selected all three of the wall vents I submitted. If you find yourself in Denver, you can swing by and check out the vents until October 25th.

Louver Suite: Houston, copper, vitreous enamel, 8 x 14 x 0.5 in, 2018

Louver Suite: Miami, copper, vitreous enamel, 8 x 14 x 0.5 in, 2018

Louver with Mask, Enameling iron, stainless steel mesh, vitreous enamel, 5 x 14 x 0.25 in, 2022

More summer recap...

I went to see the Health in Enamel exhibition at the Metal Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. There was a beautiful selection of Martha Banyas’s work on display and an enameled “quilt” in her honor. I was invited to participate in the quilt, and so contributed the following tile and story…

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Once upon a time, there was a very young girl whose daddy was in the hospital. When it was time to visit him, she wanted to bring flowers. She asked her mother if the flowers would die. When her mother said 'yes,' the very young girl asked if rocks die. When her mother said 'no,' she decided to paint a rock for him and take it to the hospital instead of flowers. The daddy got better and came home. Our Rock People stay alive in our hearts.

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Rocks Don’t Die, enamel on copper, 4 x"4in., 2024

Catching up...

I have had a pretty great summer. It has been a nice mix of conferences, road trips, studio time and writing. Now I need to get this blog caught up a bit!

I was honored to be invited to participate it the Missing Twin exhibition at the Society of North American Goldsmith’s Conference in San Diego. This was caringly curated by Erica Meier. The premise was to use an earring that had lost its match as a starting point. The created “twin” could replicate or riff off the original.

When I began to look around for lonely earrings, my mother was my initial port of call.
She told me she still had one half of her first pair of pierced earrings.

Eleanor “Eli” Lopez had her ears pierced by her best friend and roommate, Sue Larsen.
This took place in 1967, during their senior year of college at the University of Minnesota.
Pierced ears were becoming popular so Eli pierced Sue’s ears and then Sue returned the favor.
They used ice to numb the area and then pressed a needle through the lobe and into a potato that was providing support.

My mom sent me a picture of the earring before sending it to me. It was a simple gold ball on a post. Unfortunately, the postal service somewhat crushed the padded envelope and the earring arrived wrinkled. I decided to persevere with my original plan for the project. After all, who doesn’t get a little crushed and wrinkled over time?

The earring was digitally modeled as a replica of the original but with a needle in place of the post. This was then printed and cast in 14K gold. For an end cap, I made a 3d scan of half a potato, which I then hollowed out digitally and had cast in bronze. To make the half-potato receptive to the needle, I filled it with silicone.

Digital rendering of replacement earring

Scanned potato half

Gold needle replacement earring with bronze potato ear nut (above). Inspirational source earring below.

Everybody's Bolos in the news

I have been so pleased at the reception of this exhibition which I co-curated with Brian Fleetwood and Hannah Toussaint. Ashley Callahan wrote a lovely article about the Everybody’s Bolos exhibition that made the cover of Ornament magazine. I also had the pleasure of working with Veronika Muráriková who created a colorful overview of the show for Current Obsession. We even got picked as ‘Required Reading’ for Hyperallergic! The show is up through May 10th at UNT. After that, you will have to wait until January 2025 to see it at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts or July 2025 where the work will be for sale at Hecho a Mano in Santa Fe, New Mexico..

Photograph by Dasha Wright

Everybody's Bolos

In the fall of 2021, post-baccalaureate student Hannah Reynoso Toussaint approached me about making a series of bolo ties. They were the objects that her non-binary partner most enjoyed wearing. I suggested she do some research and when she was unable to locate much information, I went looking myself. I was surprised to find very little information on the subject. The best resource by far is an exhibition catalog by the Heard Museum written by Diana Pardue and Norman Sandfield entitled “Native American Bolo Ties: Vintage and Contemporary Artistry.”

But there was nothing out there about its adoption by the queer and non-binary communities. Respected museums with established fashion and jewelry collections had few bolo ties if they were located outside the southwestern United States. The field of art jewelry has put out books on chatelaines and tiaras, but no bolo ties.

This bothered me and bothered me until I decided that this gap needed to be addressed. I reached back out to Hannah and asked if she would be interested in working on a bolo tie project. She said she would. Then I reached out to Brian Fleetwood who teaches at the Institute for American Indian Arts and with whom I served on a committee for SNAG. He was interested. So the three of us got together on a video conference and formulated a plan to have an exhibition of bolo ties with accompanying catalog. We each invited ten artists and contributed bolo ties as well. The three of us provided essays on different aspects of the bolo tie.

I was fortunate to receive a University of North Texas (UNT) Institute for the Advancement of the Arts Fellowship which gave me a semester to focus on this project as well as funds for professional photography of the bolos and publication of a catalog. Additional funding has been supplied through the generosity of the UNT Libraries, The Bohlin Company and Deedie Rose. The UNT Art Gallery had an unanticipated availability this spring, which we were able to secure. We wanted the show to leave the Southwest and were able to make an agreement with the Fuller Craft Museum to have the show travel there in 2025. To help the participants sell their work, the final exhibtion will be at a commercial gallery, Hecho a Mano, in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the summer of 2025.

With an exhibition and catalog, the next step in my mind was a symposium. This would provide an opportunity to bring in more voices and perspectives. I was able to secure a College of Visual Arts and Design Flagship Grant to support a one day symposium. Brian, Hannah and I brainstormed about speakers and put together a very diverse and interesting lineup. Eventually, the recordings will be loaded into the UNT Library Digital Collection.

This is the speaker lineup:

• Ana M. Lopez: Welcome and Introduction

• Norman Sandfield: Bola to Bolo

• Brian Fleetwood: Meaning Making

• Hannah Toussaint: Reimagining the Bolo

• Jessica Metcalfe: More than Just a Trend

• Sulo Bee: Coloring Outside the Lines: Queer Fashion and the Genderless Bolo

• Annette Becker: West Dressed - Fashion Inspired by the American Frontier

You can register for the symposium here.

Ana M. Lopez, 2023, Pneumatic Trailer Bolo with Seedpod Plumb Bobs

sterling silver, napa leather, 18 x 3.5 x .75”

photo credit: Dasha Wright

A little SMITTEN

Over the New Year transition from 2019 to 2020, about two months before the world shut down for COVID, I had a lovely adventure. I was invited by Marissa Saneholtz and Sara Brown to participate in the Smitten Forum at Pocosin. I had a great time, got a lot of work made and got to hang out with some very cool people. It was a magical week made more so in hindsight due to the separation from the maker community which necessarily followed.

Recently, these two purveyors of opportunity reached out with an invitation to get our work together for an exhibition at the ECU Symposium. While I would rather be there in person, sending my brain children to hang out with theirs seems good too. So if you find yourself in Greenville, North Carolina in the coming month, please have a look.

Louver with Mask, 2022, Enameling iron, stainless steel mesh, vitreous enamel, 5 x 14 x 0.25 in

Art on the edge... of Texas

It is a common occurrence that my work gets to go more places than I do. After all, that is one of its jobs. Whereas my jobs require regular appearances in a UNT classroom or under the title role of ‘Mom’ in Fort Worth. This week I shipped Louver With Mask off to Brownsville, Texas for the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art's 48th International Art Show. For those of you not familiar with Brownsville, it is located at the very southern tip of Texas across from Matamoros, Mexico. I am very pleased that the work was accepted to an international exhibition at a museum even more so because of the highly esteemed juror, Christina Rees. Rees was the Editor-in-Chief at Glasstire from 2017-2021 and has served as an editor at The Met and D Magazine, as the full-time art columnist at the Dallas Observer. She was the owner and director of Road Agent gallery in Dallas for three years before serving as curator of Fort Worth Contemporary Arts from 2009 to 2013. Rees was also a recipient of the Rabkin Prize, a national $50k award for outstanding arts writing.

Go fourth little wall vent, and make your mamma proud!

A work finds its forever home

I am so incredibly pleased to share that the Metal Museum Collections Committee unanimously agreed to purchase Louver Suite: Memphis for their permanent collection! It is an honor to have a second artwork in the caretaking of such an important, vibrant and friendly institution. Every time I visit this museum, I really feel like I am visiting my extended family of makers. What a great treasury to be a part of!

Louver Suite: Memphis, 9 x 14 x 0.5 in., copper, vitreous enamel, 2022

Metal Museum Exhibition: Reimagining the Real

The show is OPEN through July 9th!

Entrance to Reimagining the Real at the Metal Museum

Panorama view of installation

Natalie’s fences behind Ana’s garniture

Ana’s wall louvers flanking a radiator

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Meet the Artists Ana and Natalie

Reimagining the Real

April 23 - July 9, 2023 at the National Ornamental Metal Museum in Memphis Tennessee.

Texas National 2023

The Cole Art Center @ the Old Opera House in Nacogdoches, Texas, will look extra ventilated this spring! Two of my pieces, Louver Suite: Houston and Rooftop Garniture: Shanty Caps, were both accepted to this competition. This is a great annual exhibition put on by the Stephen F. Austin School of Art. This year’s juror is William Underwood Eiland, director of the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia. The exhibition opens on April 13th and will be up through June 30th, 2023. Please check it out if you find yourself in Nacogdoches!

Rooftop Garniture: Shanty Caps, 20 x 37.5 x 10 in., copper, vitreous enamel, patination, wood, roofing underlayment

Louver Suite: Houston, 8 x 14 x 0.5 in., copper, vitreous enamel

43RD ANNUAL CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS at Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum

The juror for this esteemed and established annual event was Beth C. McLaughlin, Artistic Director and Chief Curator of Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, MA. I was so pleased to have Grow Build Climb Fly selected for inclusion. Imposed upon the form of a pneumatic dry haul trailer, the imagery of kernels, bricks, ladders and feathers are meant to represent what I wish for my children as they move through the stages of their life. The dry haul trailer is a conveyor of grain that I often see on the highways, but is also reminiscent of mammary glands. The rope that it hangs from is made of casein fiber, derived from milk, which I spun myself.

Grow, Build, Climb, Fly, 18 x 18 x 9 in, copper, brass, vitreous enamel, casein fiber, 2021

Materials Hard and Soft

One of the best things about living in North Texas is getting to see the Materials Hard and Soft show in person every year. Now in its 36th year, the Greater Denton Arts Council does an excellent job of putting this together and the opening reception is always a big night in the local craft community. According to the website, “This year’s call for artists drew over 800 submissions from 16 countries worldwide and 45 states. Our Jurors selected 80 works for exhibition at the Patterson-Appleton Arts Center, including works from 18 states and 4 countries including Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.”

I am so grateful to have had a piece selected. If you go to see the show, look near the floor - my Louver with Face Mask is installed in a slightly sneaky way. The show is up until May 6 at the Patterson-Appleton Arts Center.

CraftForms 2022

I was so SO pleased to have one of my sculptures selected by Jeannine Falino for this annual, international, fine craft exhibition! Night Air Garniture will be on view at the Wayne Art Center from December 3, 2022, to January 21, 2023. It is always an outstanding show and I can’t wait to see installation pictures of the whole thing.

Night Air Garniture: stainless steel, vitreous enamel, silver foil, 14 x 33 x 13 in.