ABOUT

METALSMITH + CULTURAL PRODUCER

Rhea Vedro is a metalsmith and cultural producer with over twenty years of experience in the realm of creative public programming. Vedro is a Metals Artist in Residence with MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and is currently working on a 2023 sculpture commission for Boston’s City Hall Plaza. She received a 2021-22 Now + There Accelerator Fellowship for public art in Boston and served as Director of Community Engagement with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum from 2016-2021. Her consulting portfolio includes the Vizcaya Museum, Queens Museum, El Museo del Barrio, The New York City Parks Foundation, and schools, shelters, prisons and community settings throughout the Americas. Vedro taught metalsmithing at UW-Madison and SUNY New Paltz. Vedro holds a BA from NYU and 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.