Memory
rings, 2010
silk, ink, thread,
sterling silver, lacquer
October
neckpiece, 2009
silk, amber, jade, thread,
sterling silver, lacquer
®
*
#
“She has a great way of creating mass with-
out weight.”
Also remarkable, they and others note,
is Urso’s rapid rise. She made her first piece
of jewelry just four years ago, when she
ventured into the small jewelry studio her
husband had abandoned when he began
making large-scale sculpture and paintings
in an industrial building downtown.
Urso chuckles when she compares her
sudden success to moso, a kind of bamboo
that can sit dormant for several years, then
burst through the soil, often soaring as high
as 90 feet within weeks - possible because
all along it had been quietly sending out
deep, wide roots.
Urso’s roots lie in the small, mountain-
ous town of Okcheon, South Korea, where
she was bom in i960, the fourth of six sib-
lings. Myung-ok Jeon grew up amid her
country’s struggle to recover from war
and its efforts to become Westernized.
In school, she was taught to speak English,
make American food, and eat with a knife
and fork. She wore American-style clothing
and watched American TV shows like
The
Waltons
and
Hawaii Five-
0
.
But she also learned traditional Korean
calligraphy and absorbed ancient Korean
customs by helping her mother mend cloth-
ing, make rice cakes, and harvest wild veg-
etables to dry in the sun. Every autumn,
to keep out winter’s cold but let light in
to their rustic house, she and her mother
would cover the door and window open-
ings, which had no glass, with thick hanji,
Korean mulberry paper. Then they’d layer
it with dried gingko and maple leaves and
spray it with water to tighten the fibers.
“I liked to work with my hands; it is a
meditation,” Urso says. “But my hand skills
were clumsy, not perfect.” And becoming
an artist was not an option in those lean
times, she says. “I didn’t have any big
dreams growing up. I was just a plain
little girl.”
She studied biology at Soong Jun Uni-
versity, then taught it in high school for
two years, until a budding passion for fiber
arts led her to Hongik University in Seoul.
Equipped with an MFA, she reported and
edited stories about traditional and contem-
porary Korean crafts for
Monthly Art &
Craft
magazine in Seoul.
A desire to promote Korean crafts drew
her to London, where she earned her mas-
ter’s in museum and gallery management
from City University in 1995, and worked
with the British Crafts Council to organize
exhibitions.
Returning to Seoul in 1997, she opened
Hand and Mind Gallery, which exposed her
to the work of artists throughout the world.
Among them was Leonard Urso, a friend of
a friend, and a professor at Rochester Insti-
tute of Technology’s School for American
Crafts. She included Leonard’s jewelry in a
2001 show, and the two met at the opening.
Their friendship blossomed into marriage,
which brought her to Rochester.
After moving into the house they chose
together, on a wooded lot at the edge of the
city, Urso took a year to decompress and
take care of herself, her new husband, their
dog, and two cats. “Never before did I have
time to have a relationship with animals,”
she says. “My heart became softened, and
I had more space to think of life.”
She also had time - and the encourage-
ment of Leonard and her younger sister,
Mindy Myunghee Jeon - to think about
creating her own art. In 2007, she began
studying jewelry-making with Faruk Kai-
yum at the University of Rochester’s
Memorial Art Gallery. Having organized
more than 50 exhibitions and curated the
work of hundreds of artists, Urso feared
jun/jul n american craft 051
