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60 Art Jewelry ■ March 2016

WHAT IF YOU COULD TAKE YOUR

JEWELER’S BENCH outside, set it up wher-

ever you wanted, and involve the public in your

process? Michael Dale Bernard and Rachel Andrea

Davis turned that idea into a reality. What began

as an offhand comment evolved into a university-

funded research project to bring the art of

metalsmithing to public spaces in Milwaukee.

Discover what happens when two makers join forces

to build Milwaukee’s first jeweler’s bench on wheels.

by Annie Pennington

COLLIDE

When CRAFT and BIKES

And so it begins

“I want to do something like that.” While making 400

brooches for the 2013 SNAG (Society of North American

Goldsmiths) Conference, Michael Dale Bernard and

Rachel Andrea Davis watched two craft-advocacy videos

by Gabriel Craig (see “Video Advocacy,” page 64). In the

performances, Craig advocates for handmade craft, either

by engaging the public with a jeweler’s bench in the city

or by taking on the role of a sidewalk evangelist to preach

the gospel of craft. An idea was born: Could they build

something that takes the jeweler’s bench to the public,

rather than asking the public to come to them?

The proposal

Bernard, Adjunct Assistant Professor at University of

Wisconsin Milwaukee (UWM), originally hails from Los

Angeles, where there’s a huge food-truck and bike scene,

so he already knew of the connectivity that bikes can

create in a community. But it was a trip to Mexico that

opened his eyes to what was possible. While in Mexico

City, he saw thousands of mobile businesses. Instead

of traditional brick-and-mortar stores, bikes were the

storefronts. He wanted to expand upon that idea by

bringing a jeweler’s bench to the public [a].

Bernard presented Davis, one of his undergraduate

students, with a brass bicycle bell [b] and asked if she’d

help him build a bicycle with a jeweler’s bench on the