Meet Joe Silvera | Jewelry teachers and owners of Silvera Jewelry School 

We had the good fortune of connecting with Joe Silvera and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Joe, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking
(There are 3 partners who own Silvera Jewelry School in Berkeley, CA. Joe and Anat Silvera, husband and wife, who are the founders of the school, and Jenn Parnell Kirkpatrick. All three are teachers at our school, too).

Anat: It’s scary to take a risk, and yet when I think about how many times I’ve taken steps into the unknown, it’s a lot. When I finished my masters program in folklore, I could see my path ahead in academia. And then I turned away, and without any sort of safety net, I decided to become a jeweler. My friends and colleagues were shocked and couldn’t understand how I could turn down a job, security, etc. I had to work hard, take on side jobs, but eventually I was able to support myself with my jewelry, selling to stores around the country and at shows. Eventually I started teaching jewelry, first for my friends who owned Baubles and Beads in Berkeley, and then at schools and festivals. That was a risk as well. I didn’t know if that would work, or what would happen. It turned out so well that now I own a jewelry school. Nothing was guaranteed. It was a risk, a best guess, and faith in myself that I could do it. Without risks, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

Joe: Being a creative person, working in a creative field, and for yourself is all about trying to be comfortable with risk. I had no idea that I would end up teaching at my own school. I started out decades ago as a fine arts major. I discovered jewelry and I took a chance and changed my major. I thought, it has to be more lucrative than painting or sculpture, right?

Well, maybe if I stayed in a job as a bench jeweler, doing repairs and such for a boss. But I like being my own boss, so I learned very quickly that you have to focus your creativity on solving problems like “how am I going to make enough money to pay the bills?”. It’s risky. A paycheck isn’t guaranteed, but you know it’s coming.

I learned to use creativity to solve problems: take on freelance jewelry jobs, design a line and sell it, learn how to teach jewelry, figure out how to create a jewelry school and to attract students, etc. Signing a contract for a retail show, paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for a booth, is a risk. Will I sell enough? Buying gold and silver and stones to make jewelry – will I sell enough to stay afloat and support myself? Want to start a school? Signing a lease on an empty space with only your faith in yourself that you’ll do everything you can to bring in students, to bring all that you can to teaching them so that they will come back for more and tell their friends – it’s all a huge risk. But the idea of not doing it, of working a 9 – 5 job that didn’t make me happy, was worse.

Even today, facing shutdowns and the pandemic, the partners and I took the risk to move quickly to online classes. And it worked! But we were all so scared to teach jewelry over the internet. Could it work? Would students try it? Now, we’re still facing risk, as the shape of teaching changes rapidly from just brick and mortar to remote learning, and competition changes. So we have to stay on top of it or risk falling behind.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
Jenn, Anat and Joe are teachers and owners of Silvera Jewelry School in Berkeley, CA. From the beginning, we wanted our school to be a great place to learn how to make jewelry – clean, well organized, with workshops that are not only full of great techniques, but also fun and inspiring.

To do that, our team works hard – especially now during pandemic times! – to create great workshops and to make sure everything runs smoothly. We keep the classroom clean and sanitized. We have benches organized with a full set of tools for each student, including torches for soldering and flex shafts for polishing. And our staff and guest instructors are professional jewelers and jewelry artists who love teaching their craft to students.

Setting up a school wasn’t easy, but it was fun. All of us had been teaching for schools or other places previously. Having the opportunity to create our own space was and continues to be very exciting. How amazing is it to be able to do what you love and share that with students who love it, too! So, everytime we had to creatively overcome challenges, whether it was designing new online workshops, building a jewelry classroom, recovering from getting burgled, or dealing with the pandemic, that essential joyful spirit has kept us coming back and going forward.

Anat and Joe Silvera founded Silvera Jewelry School in 2011, 11 years ago. We are so happy to welcome Jenn Parnell Kirkpatrick as our new business partner. She has taught us so much about the benefits of being a team. She has a deep knowledge of a broad spectrum of jewelry techniques that she brings to our workshops. And there is a lot that has to be done in the background to make a good school. Working together, we can offer classes in more techniques and share the burdens. It’s so hard to do it alone, with just two people. Anat and Joe did that for the first several years. Now we have great help from our staff and volunteers, too. We all share the same belief in doing all we can to make our jewelry workshops great by having everything needed at hand, organized and ready so that there are no impediments to learning. Students can focus on the important things, like learning how to cast, fabricate jewelry, set stones, enamel, etc.

We’re also proud of our focus on using safe materials and tools that are human and home friendly. We want students to be able to continue to practice at home what they learn at school. At some schools students only use big torches and equipment that can be intimidating to set up on your own. So we start our students with kitchen friendly butane torches, biodegradable chemicals, and educate them about how to choose healthier materials. We teach the same professional techniques, just with better tools.

Silvera Jewelry School has always brought in nationally recognized and award winning jewelers and jewelry artists as guest instructors, from all over the world. These workshops offer amazing opportunities for students to be exposed to how a master of their art thinks about their art, their creative process and their tips for making. Learning from several teachers, like one of our staff instructors, or visiting guests, is a great way to increase knowledge and learn different ways of approaching design and fabrication.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
We host guest teachers and students who come from all over the US, Canada and the UK, so far. When they come to visit, we love to show them what we love about living in the Bay Area. One of the most amazing assets we have here is great food. We live with a year round bounty of fresh vegetables and fruit, from a mostly temperate climate that cultivates a year round display of blooms, leafy trees and plants. So, we like to take them to Berkeley Bowl. It’s so much more than a grocery store – it’s like a museum of foods! Their organic produce section alone is bigger than most grocery store’s entire produce aisle. It’s fun to turn them loose and watch their eyes go wide with the excitement of it all.

There are so many amazing restaurants in the East Bay. One of the top 5 eateries that we like to share with guests is Anchalee on Dwight and San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. This humble Thai restaurant consistently delivers some of the best food that we have ever eaten. The dishes are classic and at the same time creatively infused with deep flavors that make it a favorite, too, of returning teachers. If you go there, be sure to enjoy the Moo Yang pork with bok choy and the curry puffs stuffed with potatoes and carrots.

Another outstanding restaurant is Sol Food in San Rafael. We’ve been going to Sol since it was barely bigger than a kitchen with a few stools for customers, next to a dry cleaner. They’re new larger space on Lincoln Street is full of color and family history, which is a great backdrop to the spicy chicken, beans, rice and plantains. We like to get a nice variety of Puero Rican dishes to go, since it’s so busy, and savor it back to school to share with our instructors.

Guests give us the excuse to be tourists in our own city. Our favorite spots include the WPA murals and views at Coit Tower in San Francisco, and our fantastic museums, including the De Young and SFMOMA. The Legion of Honor not only has great exhibitions and a delicious cafe, but also boasts some fantastic foggy views of the bay area.

Since a lot of our guests love jewelry, we like to make sure that we bring them to Shibumi Gallery, now on 4th Street in Berkeley. April Higashi, the owner and a jewelry artist herself, curates an incredible collection of handmade jewelry.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Anat: I’m grateful to my first teacher, who taught me how to solder jewelry when I was 11 years old. They were patient enough to encourage a young girl to make jewelry. I have stayed in love with making jewelry ever since. Much later, Peter Ostwald, a local jewelry teacher, taught me how to be a professional jeweler. He passed away in 2020, and I’m thankful to him. And I want to give a big shoutout to Lisa and Jim Kaufman, owners of Baubles and Beads in Berkeley, which I think was the best bead store in the Bay Area. They trusted me to start a jewelry class program back in 1991, including soldering and stone setting. Without them, I don’t think that I would be teaching jewelry today. Thank you, Jim and Lisa!

Joe:
Well, I’m going to give a shoutout to Anat, my wife and business partner. Shortly after we met, she introduced me to teaching jewelry. Anat had been teaching for years, and we were looking for yet another way to earn an income in the big city. Right away I loved it! I’m so thankful to her. Anat showed me how to teach novices, how to craft a class, and the importance of being patient.

I’d also like to thank my jewelry teachers, Al Pine and Dieter Muller-Stach, from my university days. I realize now that besides teaching me the craft of jewelry, they were also teaching me the importance of sharing what you know with others. The art of jewelry has been handed down from master to apprentice for thousands of years. I’m grateful to them for being my teachers.

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