Joyce Goodman

Many things draw me to work as a designer and artist. The first is that it is a way of learning about materials and how things work. Beauty, itself, also compels me to live a creative life. Beauty lifts hearts and hopes. Wherever we encounter it, Beauty opens us to embrace new experiences.

When the objects we use and the environments we inhabit are designed with care and thought about the aesthetic experience as well as the practical one, it makes everything we do easier, happier, calmer. I am all for that, and good design is all about that.

My design background started with a BFA in Interior Design and segued into Product Design, Textiles and Surfaces over time.

Since 1994 I have been making art jewelry, primarily using ancient, Classical gold-smithing methods. Reinterpreting the timeless design languages of Egypt, Greece and Rome, I began to add fiber techniques I have enjoyed for years - weaving, knitting and crocheting - applying textile techniques to metal. (Heddle to the metal? a heddle is part of a loom. bad joke?)

Expanding beyond the intimate scale of jewelry, I knit large sculptures to float suspended from ceilings. Fascinated by texture and organic growth, I made “portrait” translations of the textural organic patterns I saw in tree bark.

Wherever it was exhibited, my metal-textile fabrications intrigued jewelry customers and gallery visitors. Knitters were particularly curious. After years of working with metals, I knew that switching from knitting fiber to metal involves more than switching from wool to cotton.

So, I decided to put the knowledge and skill I had gathered into other knitter’s hands and started Knit Kits, Inc. - Knit Kit Jewelry.

My undergraduate and graduate studies in Interior and Industrial Design were followed by professional experience in both those fields. As a jeweler, I studied with masters Bessie Jameson, Louise Parrish and Chuck Evans. I has also studied with Arlene Fisch, Katherine Cobey and Jerry Bleem, three great innovators in fiber techniques, its practice, non-traditional uses and their expression through non-traditional materials.

Jewelry by Joyce Goodman has been shown at such venues as The Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show, ACC Baltimore, The Walters Museum, SOFA/NY, Aaron Faber Gallery and The American Craft Museum. I taught jewelry making at Jewelry Arts Institute in NY, and am proud of my work establishing a jewelry program in Salvador, Brazil for Projeto Axe – an NGO that uses mastery gained through art to save the lives of children living on the streets.

The sculptural work has been shown in Fine Art galleries in New York, Chicago, Boston, Alberta, Canada, among others.

I live in Manhattan with my sweet, handsome rescue Corgi, Spanky of Carnegie Hill.