Tending Time: Jewelry as a living Practice

Carol Blumthal and Rachel Suzanne Smith are artists working within the intersection of craft, materiality, and storytelling. Their disciplines span the jewelry, metalwork, digital and traditional fabrication, their shared focus is transformation of space, substance, and meaning.

Carol Blumthal (Memphis, TN)

Carol Blumthal is a Memphis-based jewelry artist known for sculptural, story-rich pieces that fuse fine art with rebellious elegance. Her work explores permanence and reinvention, drawing from geology, fashion, and personal narratives. Her collections have been featured in British Vogue, shown at Milan Jewelry Week, and highlighted in exhibitions at the Brooks Museum of Art. In 2024, she debuted Pure Form, a wearable art collection inspired by her father’s legacy in geology, blending crystal structures with organic forms in precious metals
Rachel Suzanne Smith (Cleveland, OH)

Rachel Suzanne Smith, based in Northeast Ohio, is a metalsmith, educator, and digital fabrication specialist. She creates wearable sculpture and limited production art jewelry while teaching as Professor of Practice at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Her work explores identity, memory, and belonging through the visual and narrative language of opulence and adornment constructed from the forms of native and pollinator-supporting plants and wildflowers

Tending Time: Jewelry as a Living Practice is a multi-day, in-person pop-up exhibition During New York City Jewelry Week that explores the intersection of ritual, adornment, and material transformation. Through one-of-a-kind and limited-edition jewelry, and botanical sculptural works, the exhibition invites viewers to experience the act of making as a living, evolving practice that honors care, slowness, and connection.

United by a shared commitment to process, transformation, and stewardship, Blumthal and Smith seek to explore the relationship between nature-driven and human-constructed worlds by blurring boundaries between adornment, environment, and ritual.

This show will be mounted on a shared landscape rooted in craft, storytelling, and collaboration. We position jewelry not only as adornment, but as a connecting point between people, materials, histories, and environments. Through metalsmithing, botanical installation, and digital fabrication, this show aims to reflect our expanding definitions of jewelry. In our hands, jewelry and adornment become vessels for care, records of time and memories, and a way to translate the ephemeral into tangible between people, materials, histories, and environments.