A Dream Outside My Body
Various Artists
November 7, 2025 – January 11, 2026
A Dream Outside My Body brings together 10 Baltimore-based artists who work in the expanded field of jewelry and metalsmithing. Connected to one another by association with the Baltimore Jewelry Center, these artists have either found or maintained a place for their practice in Baltimore. A strong and supportive creative community, nurtured by and within this city, is central to their ability to explore their ideas and materials deeply and in dialogue with a vibrant art scene.
Versed in the languages of wearable, sculptural, and functional objects, their work collectively expresses the ability of craft and design to give a portable and public form to the invisible dreams we share. Their objects embody loves, desires, hopes and fears in ways that draw viewers, wearers, and users alike to one another through simple acts of display and use.
exhibiting artists
Cindy Cheng
Cindy Cheng is a jeweler and sculptor who lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Before focusing completely on her studio practice, Cindy was a faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) where she taught in the Drawing and General Fine Arts Departments. She has been an artist resident at the Joan Mitchell Center NOLA, Anderson Ranch and the Vermont Studio Center. She is a recipient of a 2018 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant and in 2017 she won the Sondheim Artscape Award. She has been a finalist for the Trawick Prize in 2016, ’17 and ’21. Cindy has participated in many exhibitions, most recently at the Baltimore Museum of Art and at Current Space (Baltimore, MD). She is driven by a thirst for acquiring skills and grabs any opportunity to learn something new. Recently, that has meant taking a dive into cloisonne enameling and gem carving, especially faceting. Cindy received her BA from Mount Holyoke College. She received a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from MICA in 2008 and then earned an MFA from MICA’s Mount Royal School of Art in 2011.
Margo Csipő
Margo Csipő is a jeweler, illustrator, educator and writer working and teaching out of the Baltimore Jewelry Center. Her practice explores jewelry and masks as vessels for meaning to be emptied and filled by the creator and wearer both physically and metaphorically. This fabrication-heavy, illustrative jewelry is done with the ancient technique scrimshaw, where images are hand scribed or engraved into materials such as mother of pearl, bone, or amber. Processing time and growth through these sequential images, the artist attempts to understand their own myth in flux.
Csipő’s work has been shown at SCHMUCK, featured in Metalsmith Magazine and Current Obsession, and she is a recent winner of Preziosa Young and a finalist for AJF’s Young Artist award 2024.
J Diamond
J Taran Diamond is a metalsmith, craft educator and internationally published scholar on the subject of jewelry based in Baltimore, Maryland. Diamond holds an MFA from the University of Georgia, in addition to a BFA from the University of North Texas. Diamond’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, the Czong institute of Contemporary Art in Gimpo, South Korea, and the National Ornamental Metal Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. Diamond has also completed residencies at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and the Baltimore Jewelry Center, where she is currently a Teaching Fellow and Studio Manager.
Diamond’s work as a maker is characterized by an attention to the relationship that objects, materials, and bodies have to one another. In particular, her studio practice focuses on the ways that jewelry and other objects placed on the body become allegories for interactions, experiences, and identities.
Outside of the studio, Diamond is an advocate for black people in the fields of craft and academia, and works to help achieve equity and accessibility within those fields.
Luci Jockel
Luci Jockel is an educator and artist who seeks reconnection with flora and fauna through wearable and sculptural mementos. Using unearthed materials, such as animal remains, stone and metal, the artist and viewer become physically tied to their surroundings and asked to remember their dependence on the earth. Luci received a M.F.A from Rhode Island School of Design in Jewelry and Metalsmithing, 2016 and a B.F.A. from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Jewelry and Ceramics, 2014. She was the recipient of the MSAC Grants for Artists, 2024, SNAG’s Educational Endowment Scholarship, 2021 and American Craft Council Emerging Voices Award in 2019. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally at venues such as Galerie Handwerk, R&Company and RISD Museum. Luci has curated exhibitions at Baltimore Jewelry Center, Towson University and as part of JV Collective- a cohort of seven art jewelers. She actively teaches workshops at craft schools, such as Brooklyn Metal Works, Baltimore Jewelry Center and Peters Valley School of Craft. Luci maintains a studio practice in Baltimore, MD where she holds the position of Metalsmithing & Jewelry Lecturer and Area Coordinator at Towson University. Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, RISD Museum, Galerie Marzee and ArtYard and is represented by Gallery Loupe in Montclair, NJ.
Elliot Keeley
Elliot Keeley is an artist and metalsmith from Raleigh, North Carolina. He earned a BFA with a concentration in metalsmithing and jewelry design from Appalachian State University. From 2017 to 2019, he was a Core Fellow at Penland School of Craft, where he honed his technical skills and explored interdisciplinary approaches to making.
Elliot’s work incorporates a diverse range of materials and processes, including, drawing, painting, and collage, while maintaining a strong foundation in metal. His practice is rooted in material exploration and craftsmanship, often blending traditional techniques with experimental applications. Through his work, he investigates themes of memory, personal narratives, and material relationships.
Currently based in Baltimore, Maryland, Elliot serves as the Studio and Program Manager at the Baltimore Jewelry Center, a non-profit educational space dedicated to contemporary jewelry and metalsmithing. In this role, he oversees studio operations, supports emerging artists, and helps develop programming that fosters creativity and technical growth within the community. He is passionate about expanding access to craft education and creating opportunities for makers to engage with metalwork in new and meaningful ways.
Elliot continues to exhibit his work nationally and remains active in the craft community, participating in workshops and collaborative projects that push the boundaries of traditional metalsmithing.
Andy Lowrie
Andy Lowrie is a jewelry artist who makes wearable, sculptural and functional objects, as well as works on paper. He is an Australian maker, living and working in the United States. Andy pursues contemporary expressions of jewelry and object making that interrogate and reflect his life and experiences while drawing on the power of a wearable object to act as an extension of a maker/wearer’s intentions and desires. Narratives of queerness, family, labor and environmental catastrophe are currently feeding this work. The potential of process and material as metaphor is also important to his practice, expressed through experimentation with surface finishes that include paint, powder coat and enamel.
His work has been exhibited in Australia, China, Europe and North America, and has been professionally recognised with awards from Brooklyn Metal Works in New York and My-Day By-Day Gallery in Rome. From 2020-2023 he was the inaugural Teaching Fellow at the Baltimore Jewelry Center. He is currently an adjunct faculty member at Towson University and Johns Hopkins University.
Molly Shulman
Originally from Frederick, MD, Molly studied fine art at James Madison University where she graduated with a BFA concentration in Metals and Jewelry. In 2017, Molly began working at the Baltimore Jewelry Center as a Youth Instructor for the After School Program. She now supervises multiple youth programs, teaches classes, and responds to calls for commissioned pieces of jewelry. Working closely with kids and teens helps remind her of why she wanted to join this field – the simple thought that jewelry is fun (fun to design, fun to make, and fun to wear) and ultimately keeps her grounded in her practice. In her production work she relies heavily on shape and color. The use of creative powder coating and her attention to detail allow her to keep her design quite simple in nature. Her work in this exhibition explores the social phenomenon that is reality TV and the hold it has on her generation. For most of her teen years and adult life, Molly has been a consumer of reality programming. Her love of the genre has pushed her to look deeper into the content and its connection to popular culture today.
April Wood
April Wood is an artist, metalsmith, and jeweler based in Baltimore, MD. She received her BFA in Metals/Jewelry from Texas State University – San Marcos (1997) and her MFA from Towson University (2008). Her work explores people’s relationships to food, ritual, nourishment, and arousal through a highly ornamented investigation of fruiting forms. The forms she creates represent the corporeal body and through the placement of the work on the body Wood examines jewelry’s role as signifier, and a means throughout history for communicating availability, fertility, and fecundity. Delicate lace and botanical patterns envelop forms constructed of mild steel, questioning binaries of masculine and feminine, strength and delicacy, soft and hard, industrial and natural.
April Wood exhibits her work nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Ombré Gallery (OH) and the Austin Museum of Art Laguna Gloria (TX). She has taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art, the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Penland School of Crafts, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Towson University, Idyllwild Arts Academy, Metalwerx, Silvera Jewelry School, and Pocosin Arts School of Fine Craft. She is co-founder of the Baltimore Jewelry Center where she served as Studio and Programs Manager and Exhibitions Director. Her work has been featured in Metalsmith, Surface Design Journal, and Sculpture.
Elaine Zukowski
Elaine Zukowski is a craftsperson and art conservator based in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2002 she received her BFA in Fiber Art from the Maryland Institute. Her six years working as a mold maker with the New Arts Foundry in Baltimore provided training in the “lost wax” process of casting both large and small original artist made sculptures. The past fifteen years of employment with a small art conservation firm specializing in 19th century gilded objects led to working on many notable projects, including preservation of historic ornament at the U.S. Capitol. This profession affords additional experience in mold making and casting with resins, wood carving, and traditional gilding.
An intro to metalsmithing class in 2009 sparked a love of working with metal and discovering the history of contemporary jewelry. Continuous exploration with materials and processes has resulted in several jewelry lines since 2012. The recent body of work combines mold making and casting with crocheted and hand dyed monofilament. In her wearable pieces she seeks to capture the sensation of ephemera, of having seen something that will last for only a short while before it is replaced or forgotten.
In recent years Elaine’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at New York Jewelry Week 2021-2023 and Milan Jewelry Week 2022. Her work was a part of the Museum of Art and Design’s MAD about Jewelry show in 2023, and she attended Arrowmont School’s winter Pentaculum in 2024. Her work is currently represented in the Baltimore Jewelry Center’s retail gallery, Metal Shop.