“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.” Frances Hodgson Burnett

Jamie Bennett doesn’t just work in enamel—he reimagines its possibilities. Over a career spanning more than four decades, he has transformed the field of contemporary jewelry through an alchemical blend of color, form, and process. His pieces are luminous surfaces where pigment meets metal, ornament meets intellect, and beauty becomes a question rather than a conclusion.⁠

Born in Philadelphia in 1948, Bennett trained as a painter before finding his voice in jewelry. He’s best known for pioneering a painterly approach to enamel, moving it from the decorative edge toward the conceptual center. The results are rich with ambiguity—blossoms that feel both botanical and abstract, edges that dissolve, palettes that evoke bruised petals or luminous decay.⁠
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Bennett served as director of the SUNY New Paltz Metal/Jewelry Program for nearly three decades, shaping generations of artists alongside notable figures such as Myra Mimlitsch-Gray and Robert Ebendorf. He’s received numerous honors, including the Society of North American Goldsmiths Lifetime Achievement Award, three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and the James Renwick Alliance’s Outstanding Educator Award.⁠
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His work is held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the MFA Boston, the LACMA, and many more. But its true resonance lies in the intimacy it cultivates: these are objects to be held, worn, studied—jewels that resist easy meaning.⁠

In GARDEN, Bennett’s work blooms quietly. Meditations on what it means to ornament the body with the sensuous, the subtle, the strange. A reminder that nature, like enamel, is never static—it’s always in flux.⁠