As we enter into this abundant new year, I wanted to share with you all a little bit about who I am and how Cate’s on Fire came to be. I am not only a jewelry designer, I am also a former gallerist and art dealer, a forever arts advocate, an obsessive reader, a writer, and a voraciously curious human. I am queer, Jewish, a mom to 2 teenagers, and I live in a non-compliant body that does not approve of the speed of life in 2023, and carries a host of strangeness, disability and power. I am forever obsessed with mythological and historical origin stories, and trying to figure out how to tell my own feels a little overwhelming, but I’m excited to give it a shot. 

To give you some backstory, I was born and raised in Los Angeles, and lived on the East Coast for 10 years (with a brief stop at Goldsmiths in London), where I studied art semiotics at Brown. Unfortunately, I got dramatically sick and left two credits short of graduating when the University administration let me down for the 832nd time. I moved to New York and started a semi-annual literary art journal called No: a journal of the arts with Ben Lerner, while working sometimes at galleries and doing jobs of various kinds to make it all work. 

I got married, came back to LA and had two kids in relatively quick succession. I started and ran an art gallery in LA for ten years with my wonderful mother, artist Patricia Doede Klowden (Klowden Mann, 2010-2020). 

In March 2020, I called all of my artists and told them I had decided to close the gallery at the end of the summer. My artists were my family and some of my greatest loves, and though it broke my heart, I knew that this time was asking me for a different kind of space-making than the one I had moved through for this last decade. 

At the same time, through my forever love of collecting jewelry, I had become welcomed into a beautiful community of jewelry lovers online, and it was absolutely my safe space to unwind myself. So jewelry became the language with which I learned how my voice could resonate in ways that inspired and surprised me. 

And so, Cate’s on Fire grew very naturally from the relationships and love I poured into this special community, and they into me. And it turned out, once I started, I discovered that I had always been designing in my head, at the unexpected and now beloved intersection of my interest in art, history, and embodiment–in jewelry. 

As we wear jewels to adorn our bodies, I implore you all to remember that we are all connected to one another, and it’s up to us to choose how we impact that connection. It is far too easy to prioritize the preservation of power over presence, but if we choose to really be with one another and promote presence over dominance, the forms we could create for our connection are incredible. Artistic expression is where we get to imagine those forms, which makes it one of our most vital resources.  

There are still phenomenal artists and gallerists and curators doing important work in LA in both commercial and non-commercial spaces. Please feel free to write me anytime and I will happily tell you where I think you should be sending your resources.