This past summer, I had the honor of interning for Brooklyn-based jeweler Judy Geib. I had been making jewelry at the 92nd Street Y for about a year, and my teacher and the program director put me in contact with Judy. The instant I met her and saw the studio, I knew I was in the right place.
Judy’s studio is amazing. When you walk in you can smell toffee for some reason (we could never figure out why), and a little entryway opens out into a large room with huge shelves filled with books about jewelry, reaching all the way up to the high ceiling. Panning over to the left, there is a low table covered with finished work and brightly colored wool pouches that Judy knitted herself. Three longer, stone tables, the leftmost one littered with papers and usually a jar of Judy’s lunch, sit toward the back of the room, by the windows. Judy sits at the far end of the middle table, surrounded by wire clippings, pieces of posterboard with gold, silver, and stones arranged on them, along with tiny gold jump-rings and little flat circles of metal that she calls “squashes”– a signature part of her work.
NPR or 90.7 often plays from a little white radio with a precarious chord-and-antennae situation that sits beyond her soldering setup, and the beautiful chaos continues all the way down and onto the next table. Her assistant, Lily Beqiri, works at the head of the rightmost table, past the blue-tinged bowls of pickle (a mild corrosive used to remove oxidation from metals) and tiny little silver squares of solder (thin metal used to connect larger metal components like a molten glue) scattered along the tables waiting to be melted and used.
Lily sits in front of a tower of bricks that she uses for soldering her pieces together. A metal surface for hammering sits on a sandbag, which sits on a log next to her, and machines and tools are scattered across the room, near walls plastered with drawings and tiny ziploc bags, pinned up with thumbtacks for easy access.
When I worked for Judy, there was always something to do. Sometimes we’d listen to the radio, while we worked, or put cotton in our ears while one of us hammered. Other times Judy would take me with her to Bergdorf Goodman to deliver finished pieces, or to her associates to pick up repairs. Once, some of Judy’s buyers from the jewelry store Twist came to look at her work and I got to “model” an emerald earring. But for the most part, the usual routine was to just sit down and work, Lily on my right making bezels for emeralds in seconds, Judy down at the other end of the table, soldering and soldering. Between studio work and long subway rides, we had a lot of time to talk.
Judy said it all started “[w]hen I was about forty, on a whim I bought a torch and made a pair of earrings for myself, and I loved it.” And whenever we talked about her experiences as a jeweler, Judy always said the same thing: “I came to New York for art.”
She had finished her undergraduate in art at Kutztown State College in Pennsylvania where she met “lots of the great artists (painters, dancers, musicians, poets) of the 1980s — Philip Glass, John Cage, Jackie Windsor, Joan Jonas, Bill T Jones and Arnie Zane, Molissa Fenley, Nam June Paik, Lucio Pozzi, [and] David Shapiro” as part of the school’s Visiting Artist Program. This program pushed her to pursue the arts and exposed her to the “art thinking” that remains her most prominent influence to this day. She said, “I moved to New York in my last semester of college to intern with three artists and seek my place in that world.”
While she was busy seeking, Judy took on a day job at the Architecture Institution in New York, doing graphic design for architect Peter Eisenman. This work sustained her for 15 years before she took the leap into jewelry, and she held onto her job as a freelance graphic designer for a little while before she started to make jewelry full-time.
She did not have much formal training in jewelry besides a book by Murray Bovin called “Jewelry Making for Schools, Tradesmen, Craftsmen.” That didn’t matter to Judy, though. She said “when I made jewelry I just had fun making.”
Despite having had little professional training, Judy’s process only adds to the beauty of her work. She said, “I use traditional precious materials…[and] I use whatever means necessary — and that is not usually classical, refined jeweler’s techniques.” I remember her saying that when she set stones into her jewelry she didn’t use the method I’d learned in my jewelry classes – the one that involves the bezel pusher and rocker and burnisher. I was surprised, but Judy’s process made more sense, got the job done more efficiently, and it gave the finished piece a certain air. It seemed to say, “a real person made me – how about that?”
As Judy said, “My pieces brazenly show the process of their making, and with precious jewelry materials to signal that it is serious work.” And she doesn’t care what other people think. She commented, “The most important thing I did was to stay honest to what I wanted to make…you have to do your own work and not compare yourself to other people.”
Judy’s work is organic and asymmetrical. Cabochon dendritic agate, moonstone, peridot, pale and faceted emeralds, all arranged in beautiful displays, colors offsetting each other. Suns, moons, whales, and flowers, loop-de-loops and “spiralies.” She also makes necklaces of metallic flowers arranged in the shape of a peter-pan-collar, which, even though she has emphasized that she is not a Flower Person, is something of a Judy Geib staple.
Her art goes beyond jewelry, too – elements of daily life are sprinkled throughout her repertoire. On her “completed projects” table sit two pairs of silver glasses, cocktail stirrers with silver whales on them, knit cases for completed jewelry… Judy eats her lunch with handmade utensils, and her hair is usually held back by a headband that, of course, she crafted from silver. All her work is very individualistic, especially, as Judy says, in its “handmade-ness.” In a profile by The New York Times, she commented: “Hand making is especially important to me because it is a slow process that lets ideas gradually come into focus.”
When she was just starting out as a jeweler, Judy only had one consistent customer. This customer bought from her for six years before Judy’s friend, Miki, introduced her to a buyer from the department store Barneys in New York. In 2002, she made an appointment with some representatives to show them some of her work, and they bought her first 12 pieces, agreeing to sell them. Judy said “It took about two years until I was selling enough to do jewelry full-time [and]…it took many many more years before I was confident I actually had a thriving business.”
While Barneys closed in New York in 2019 due to bankruptcy, they were an important first step in Judy’s career as a professional jeweler. Today, Judy sells her work, online and in person, from Bergdorf Goodman in New York, to Mouki Mou in London and Athens, to Arts & Science in Tokyo.
Now that her business is going strong, Judy does almost everything herself. She said, “I have a very small business, just me and Lily, my wonderful assistant, who is almost full time. I…make the work, design-while-making, purchase all the materials including gem shopping in Colombia, conceptualize advertising, the bookkeeping, manage accounts, ship and messenger.” And, of course, she keeps busy with trips into the city, visiting a pave setter, laser solderers, and weaving in and out of stone retailers whenever inspiration strikes, often out of nowhere.
Once, we were returning from a meeting in the city, when she turned off onto a side street and into a stone shop. The walls were lined with strings and strings of stones, and while I tried really carefully not to touch anything, Judy looked at coral cameos and turquoise beads. On the way back, she explained how she had been inspired by the cameos, and how it connected to some of the previous work she’s done with silhouettes and shapes.
Judy told me that when she’s working on something, she wants to surprise herself, to do something exciting, something she hasn’t seen anyone do before. The curling waves and “wave letters” on her Moby Dick pieces were especially exciting to her – she created her own font specifically for the piece. She also mentioned that she had a lot of fun making the infinite, geometric patterns for her Cosmic Ornament pieces and making her silhouette necklaces of silver birds and cartoon characters strung alongside precious stones.
Judy made it clear that her work isn’t trying to make some sort of statement or commentary. She barely calls it “art.” To her, the point of making jewelry has always been that it should bring people joy. She describes the fabrication process as “playing” with jewelry, and her works aim to share that whimsy with the world. Her jewelry isn’t meant to be a status symbol, either. She said, “I want to upend expectations and delight instead of communicate wealth and power…I want it to be fun and whimsical.”
Unless she has a commission or project in process, Judy usually sits and makes squashes or flower petals, little shapes that she knows she will use in some of her more common pieces. I remember sitting with a roll of flattened silver wire and folding it into triangles, spirals, and occasionally into spring-like lengths that Judy soldered around circles to make rounded petals. She had me make a lot of them, and she would use them all much more quickly than I expected her to.
I think the process of fabrication is an opportunity to mull over designs and inspiration. While we sat, working, my mind often wandered, and I’m sure Judy’s does too. I had a lot of time to consider what she taught me: that jewelry should be fun, that silver is hard to run a business on, but beautiful to work with, that sometimes the “technically correct” methods can be subverted in the name of efficiency and style, and that you have to do what you love, and you have to do it in the way that makes sense to you.
Judy Geib is always working. She told me once that she goes into the studio almost every day, because, as she puts it, “I am so proud of my work, and my challenge is still always to surprise myself with the next project.”
I, for one, cannot wait to see what it will be.
“When I made jewelry I just had fun making,” said Judy Geib.