ABOUT

METALSMITH + CULTURAL PRODUCER

Rhea Vedro is a metalsmith creating at the intersection of materiality and collective healing. Her research explores metalsmithing as a cultural signifier of values, power and protection across belief-systems and time. Trained first as a jeweler, her studio practice is primarily hollow-form steel sculpture. Vedro is a Metals Artist in Residence & Technical Instructor within MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and is currently working on a public art sculpture commission for Boston’s City Hall Plaza to install spring 2025.

Vedro received a 2021-22 Boston Public Art Triennial Accelerator Fellowship for public art in Boston, and served as Director of Community Engagement for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum from 2016-2021. Her project portfolio includes the City of Boston Mayor's Office of Arts + Culture, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Artisans Asylum, North Bennet Street School, Vizcaya Museum, Queens Museum, The New York City Parks Foundation, and museums, schools, shelters and creative community spaces throughout the Americas. Vedro holds an MFA in Metalsmithing from SUNY New Paltz.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am exploring the peregrine. My work refers to migration and protection, the falcon, the pilgrimage. Early civilizations and contemporary societies have been shaped by the mining and refining of metal into objects and tools of traded value, beauty, war, infrastructure, ceremony and industry. My practice explores the lineage of humankind’s relationship with metal, its alchemies and material properties. The physicality of moving vision into form through metalsmithing can be a small embodied experience of affecting change on a material level – a metaphor for our agency to transform our realities.

My recent steel sculptures are informed by ideas of mystical birds and boats, migration and transmutation. My subsequent sketches and visual research investigate migrations of people and goods, elaborate saddles, ancient Viking ships and Egyptian bird iconography referencing the guardian that carries the soul safely out of the body in its migration from material to immaterial. I am inspired by the question of what we offer and what we carry, where we will be changed by our journeys and what we claim as constant.