{"id":25208,"date":"2021-06-24T17:05:54","date_gmt":"2021-06-25T00:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/hi-lo\/?p=30000020937"},"modified":"2023-03-19T22:53:18","modified_gmt":"2023-03-20T05:53:18","slug":"this-long-beach-artist-is-making-a-statement-with-her-handmade-jewelry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/hi-lo\/art\/this-long-beach-artist-is-making-a-statement-with-her-handmade-jewelry","title":{"rendered":"This Long Beach artist is making a statement with her handmade jewelry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"In the studio with jewelry maker Amy Solis\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/han9PCqTX-M?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Amy Solis is not just a jewelry maker\u2014 she\u2019s a \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/mi_corasol\/?hl=en\">Maker of Small Objects<\/a>\u201d and an artist. She carefully saws, files, solders, buffs and makes every single piece of hers shine.<\/p>\n<p>In her garage studio, Solis has carved out a neat corner workspace. Next to her stacked washer and dryer hangs a metal wire cloud sculpture with hog casing wrapped and stitched around it.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019ve been playing with corroding metal with it\u2014it turns it green,\u201d she says after apologizing for how the heat may bring out a smell in the casing (the soft incense wafting in the air masked any possible unpleasant smell).<\/p>\n<p>As she begins a demonstration of how she makes one of her pieces, while journalists watch and record, Solis nervously darts around her workspace, trying to recall the process of what she does up to nine hours a day, six days a week.<\/p>\n<p>She\u2019s working on a 1-by-2-inch brass pin with looping letters and several intricate cut-out holes. Usually, she does each step in batches, but this time she\u2019s showing her process with just one piece.<\/p>\n<p>After the first step of cutting and pasting a paper template onto a brass metal plate, Solis dons safety glasses and pulls a tool from her wall of hammers. She pounds indentations onto the metal plate to create a guide and uses a dentist\u2019s drill to create holes.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_10000046840\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-10000046840\" style=\"width: 1110px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-10000046840\" src=\"https:\/\/img.lbpost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/23130906\/0614-Amy-3-1110x657.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1110\" height=\"657\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-10000046840\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Amy Solis, Mi Corasol jewelry designer and maker, sands one of her hand-crafted creations in her workspace in Long Beach Monday, June 14, 2021. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Once that is out of the way, she begins her favorite part: sawing.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s almost like coloring, you don\u2019t have to think about it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n<p>Threading a wire-thin saw through the pre-made holes, she carefully cuts out the inlets of each letter, slowly looping around each lowercase, cursive letter: a-b-o-l-i-s-h.<\/p>\n<p>Nearly through the bottom part of the blocky \u201cPol(ICE),\u201d her saw blade snaps.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSome days I go through a ton, some days it\u2019s just one,\u201d she says as she reaches to thread a new blade into her jeweler\u2019s saw.<\/p>\n<p>Solis has been making jewelry for only two years, but she\u2019s been creating things since she can remember. She and her family immigrated to the United States from Ecuador when she was 6 years old. Solis is undocumented and was always told not to talk about her immigration status while growing up in her conservative, Christian household in Riverside County.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s why her jewelry always makes a statement now: \u201cUndocumented,\u201d \u201cQueer,\u201d \u201cAbolish Pol(ICE),\u201d \u201cThey Them\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI was told to be silent about a lot of my identity,\u201d Solis said.<\/p>\n<p>She started learning the phrases for issues she was experiencing in college while taking Women\u2019s Studies classes and studying fine arts.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt blew my mind to have all of this language around, you know, there&#8217;s patriarchy and there&#8217;s misogyny and all of these things that I felt that I had no language for,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>Solis recalled how shocked she was when she heard a student activist at a rally yell in a microphone, \u201cI\u2019m undocumented and I\u2019m not afraid!\u201d She wasn\u2019t out about her documentation status in college yet, worried she would have to pay more for the classes she was already having to pay for without financial aid.<\/p>\n<p>She began working with activist groups like the Long Beach <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/lbgrrrlcollective\/?hl=en\">GRRRL Collective<\/a>, putting on shows and learning group sessions.<\/p>\n<p>After college, she was able to get DACA, a work permit for people brought to the U.S. as children. She was working full-time for a worker cooperative non-profit, but she found herself at a computer all day, not creating.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI find no greater joy than to be making things with my hands,\u201d Solis said.<\/p>\n<p>So she made a plan to quit her job: She and her partner bought their house and she began saving all her money, going to jewelry entrepreneurship night classes at Long Beach City College. She went down to part-time work for six months and then finally quit.<\/p>\n<p>She had plans to sell her work at art fairs and events\u2014then the pandemic hit.<\/p>\n<p>Solis had trouble selling her work, which was mostly \u201ccute stuff,\u201d but she says it wasn\u2019t up to her standards now. To her, it felt like she was living two parts of her life separately: her activism and her jewelry-making.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe pandemic really forced me to sit down and think about what I wanted my stuff to say and do, not just for aesthetics,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>Her first piece with this idea was earrings made of bent wire saying \u201cgua gua chullita,\u201d an Ecuadorian phrase to mean \u201ca creative child.\u201d After the killing of George Floyd and subsequent protests against police brutality, she added more designs to her line.<\/p>\n<p>She took an Adobe Illustrator class and learned how to design templates she could recreate with brass, copper and silver. She slowly built out her studio throughout 2020 after having started with just a small jewelry anvil and saw frame\u2014 she just recently got a professional ultrasonic jewelry cleaner machine.<\/p>\n<p>Solis said she creates with metal because she knows metal will outlast her, but she also has hope that one day she won\u2019t need to make jewelry that makes a statement because being queer or undocumented will be more widely accepted and using different pronouns will be more normalized.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf somebody finds this random piece of metal that says \u2018they them\u2019 in maybe 80 years and they say, \u2018What is they them? Why would you have to use that?\u2019 Then I&#8217;ve succeeded,\u201d Solis said. \u201cI guess it just gives me hope to know that someday these things won&#8217;t matter anymore because we&#8217;re beyond it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>Amy&#8217;s designs can be found on her <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/mi_corasol\/?hl=en\">Instagram<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.etsy.com\/shop\/MiCorasol\">Etsy<\/a> shop.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Solis said she creates with metal because she knows metal will outlast her, but she also has hope that one day she won\u2019t need to make jewelry that makes a statement because being queer or undocumented will be more widely accepted and using different pronouns will be more normalized.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":216,"featured_media":71623,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_sponsor_sponsorship_scope":"","newspack_sponsor_native_byline_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_native_category_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_style":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_placement":"inherit","inline_featured_image":false,"newspack_ads_suppress_ads":false,"newspack_popups_has_disabled_popups":"","_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"_":"","_author_alias":"","cap-aim":"","cap-description":"","cap-display_name":"","cap-first_name":"","cap-jabber":"","cap-last_name":"","cap-linked_account":"","cap-newspack_employer":"","cap-newspack_job_title":"","cap-newspack_phone_number":"","cap-newspack_role":"","cap-user_email":"","cap-user_login":"","cap-website":"","cap-yahooim":"","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_email_html":"","newspack_email_type":"","newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_hide_page_title":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_show_share_buttons":"","newspack_sponsor_byline_prefix":"","newspack_sponsor_disclaimer_override":"","newspack_sponsor_flag_override":"","newspack_sponsor_only_direct":"","newspack_sponsor_url":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,32100],"tags":[175,257],"newspack_spnsrs_tax":[],"coauthors":[3292,31611],"class_list":["post-25208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","category-in-the-studio","tag-in-the-studio","tag-small-business","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/216"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25208"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72570,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25208\/revisions\/72570"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25208"},{"taxonomy":"newspack_spnsrs_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newspack_spnsrs_tax?post=25208"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=25208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}