(PRESS RELEASE) As a part of its efforts to offer pathways for the following era {of professional} jewellery makers and designers, the MJSA Training Basis lately awarded a complete of over $10,000 in scholarship funding to college students making ready for promising careers.
Three college students every obtained $3,350 scholarships:
- Amor, a pupil at Boston’s North Bennet Road Faculty, who’s pursuing a diploma of excellence in jewellery making and restore;
- Lana Ogilvie, who anticipates graduating subsequent spring with an Affiliate of Utilized Science diploma in jewellery design from the Trend Institute of Expertise in New York Metropolis; and
- Sara Lundquist, who’s scheduled to graduate subsequent spring from the Gemological Institute of America in Carlsbad, California, with a diploma in jewellery design and expertise.
The entire scholarship quantity features a $2,500 grant offered by the Windfall Jewelers Membership.
The MJSA Training Basis is a 501(c)(3) subsidiary of MJSA, the commerce affiliation devoted to skilled excellence in jewellery making and design. It helps profession and coaching initiatives that assist to make sure the jewellery trade maintains a certified, aggressive workforce, and since 1997 has awarded over $250,000 in scholarship funds.
Extra in regards to the three 2022 scholarship recipients is offered beneath.
Amor ($3,350 scholarship, together with help from the Windfall Jewelers Membership)
For Amor, jewellery making got here as one thing of a “calling,” she says. She had all the time been all in favour of style, however in 2019 the thought of making jewellery from steel took maintain. With instruments donated by associates, she created a studio from closet house in her residence in Rockland, Massachusetts. There she watched YouTube movies and experimented, principally creating copper and brass items freighted with symbolism. She quickly started promoting these early efforts, below the model title Class Summary, and in addition started taking lessons at Metalwerx in Waltham, Massachusetts. After working “feverishly” at her personal studio through the pandemic, Amor entered North Bennet Road’s Jewellery Making and Restore program in 2021.
Commercial
Submit–North Bennet Road, she needs to create a brand new enterprise/model referred to as Djefau (the traditional Egyptian time period for a reworked substance imbued with divinity). It is going to characteristic work that she calls “historic futures”—eclectic designs with an air of antiquity about them. As in her earlier efforts, her new work may have a symbolic, nearly talismanic high quality to it, with every bit conveying a novel message. “There’s a goal for each piece of bijou,” she says. “Symbols have meanings, and I ask myself who’s going to put on [the piece], the way it ought to resonate for them.” In the end, she’d prefer to develop a mixture of designs, from museum-quality items sought by collectors to items at extra inexpensive worth factors, with the choice of providing concierge design companies.
Lana Ogilvie ($3,350 Scholarship)
When Lana Ogilvie was in highschool, she deliberate to be an illustrator. She attended lessons on the Artwork Gallery of Ontario, and after graduating started high quality artwork research in illustration at Concordia College in Montreal. She continued that creative pursuit for a number of years after commencement, a time when she additionally started a profitable profession as a style mannequin and skilled: She appeared recurrently on runways in Paris, Milan, and London, and for a few years was a style skilled for Toronto-based tv applications. However within the late 2000s, after studying the right way to restore a crystal beaded necklace that had damaged, she was impressed to be taught extra about the right way to make jewellery. That want led her, in 2010, to check to turn out to be a bench jeweler at Studio Jewelers Ltd., a commerce college in New York Metropolis. Just a few years later, in 2016, she launched her personal line, Sabre Jewellery. The Sabre assortment options work—all handmade in her New York Metropolis studio—with traces which might be fluid and sinuous, as if the steel have been liquid and transferring. Shortly after launching, it was among the many manufacturers accepted into the Designer and Brokers commerce present in New York Metropolis, and final 12 months it joined the second cohort within the Pure Diamond Council’s Rising Designers Diamond Initiative. Whereas Lana intends to proceed Sabre, she additionally needs to discover a place with one of many main jewellery design homes. Towards that finish, she’s been finding out design on the Trend Institute of Expertise (FIT) and diamond grading on the Gemological Institute of America. She credit her time at FIT with increasing her horizons: “I had been doing large, sculptural items, however now I’m studying the right way to work smaller and use stones with dainty cuts.”
Sara Lundquist ($3,350 Scholarship)
“Designing jewellery has been a interest of mine since … elementary college. I’d draw out the designs I had in my head,” Sara Lundquist says. That early ardour for jewellery has solely grown. In April 2019, whereas nonetheless attending lessons at Brigham Younger College–Hawaii, Sara co-founded the Pacific Jewel Co, that includes silver and vermeil items (primarily rings) created at her non-public studio in Dana Level, California. Shortly afterward got here Lundquist High-quality, with designs made in valuable metals and gems.
As that interest has turn out to be a profession, Sara has sought to deepen her information. In 2021 she graduated from the Gemological Institute of America’s Graduate Jeweler program, then signed up for the institute’s program in jewellery design and expertise. Wanting forward, Sara has two targets. First, she needs to develop her model and, along with growing extra traces for retail sale, provide bespoke designs for a spread of purchasers. Second, she needs any success she enjoys to additionally assist others: She intends to donate a portion of her earnings to fund GIA scholarships and help different jewellery entrepreneurs and college students in fulfilling their very own desires of a jewellery profession.
For extra data, contact Wealthy Youmans, MJSA communications officer, at 1-800-444-MJSA (ext. 3025), [email protected].
