Nancy Anderson is a renowned silversmith, jewelry artisan, and found art aficionado.
Thirty years ago, silver saved Nancy Anderson from a meaningless career climbing the corporate ladder. Now, a renowned silversmith and jewelry artisan, she's taking her vintage 1974 Airstream Ambassador across America to document fellow artisans reinventing the American Dream. The goal: travel the 50 states and find and document known and unknown makers who are following their own path to success through creativity and achieving freedom that comes from living their truth.
Anderson began living her own truth just a few months after graduation from the University of Kansas in 1988.
“My senior year in college, I was taking all these really hard classes, and I thought, ‘I need something that would be kind of like recess’ and I took one silversmith class and absolutely loved it,” Anderson recalled. “I ignored that calling and took a job at the Federal Reserve Bank of Denver as a financial analyst and began hating every second of my life.”
After sitting in countless bank basements evaluating statements to determine whether the bank would go under, Nancy sought an outlet: silver.
With just a two-inch square piece of silver, she began to follow her life’s passion. First, she was making pieces for friends and family, but at their urgings, she started a grassroots effort to grow her business. In what Anderson calls “pre-Internet days” she began visiting galleries and asking questions about how they find their artists, what shows she needed to attend and how it all worked.
That’s when SweetBird Studio was born – a one-of-a-kind shop creating pieces of “spiritual hardware and sacred scrap.”
“It’s been a great road,” she said. “We have customers who have been with us for 25 years. People trust us. They come back for their special gifts.”
Beyond her faithful following, Anderson has also made one-of-a-kind pieces for Sheryl Crow, Emmy Lou Harris, Lucinda Williams, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty. In fact, Tom Cruise wore Nancy Anderson originals in Rock of Ages.
Always creating, Anderson was at a one-day workshop where she was encouraged to write for 10 minutes about her laugh-out-loud dream.
“I wrote nonstop about owning an Airstream and traveling the country,” she laughs. “That wasn’t something that was consciously in my mind.”
Nevertheless, her short time as a financial analyst taught her what happens when you don’t follow the subtle urgings of the Universe. So on her trip home, she had the thought to stop on the side of the road and search Craigslist for an Airstream to purchase.
She did just that and found The Silver Savior. For a few thousand dollars, she purchased the classic Airstream, put new tires on it and drove it away. She spent the next yen years refurbishing the vintage travel trailer. A labor of love, she gutted the whole thing and rebuilt it from the ground up.
“Everything is handmade,” Anderson said.
From the barn wood cabinets to the hammered copper countertops she crafted with her dad, to the cushions sewn at a local shop and the reclaimed hardwood floors, everything is original – just like Anderson’s art.
“What I really love about this is the charm,” Anderson said.
So when the pandemic hit, she thought: “I need to change this up – I can’t just sit at the end of the road and pretend everything is fine.”
“This journey is really about inspiring hope and good news – about going ahead and living your life anyway,” she said. “Sure, we have to be more careful. The Airstream is the vehicle that can do that. You’re not in hotels; you’re not eating out all the time. It’s the perfect way to travel now.”
Anderson and her Silver Savior are on a mission to create community at a time when many Americans feel lonely and isolated. In addition to interviews, Anderson will facilitate gatherings, art-making workshops, jam sessions, and inspirational talks with the assistance of galleries, nonprofits and local agencies.
And she will continue to create with her mobile jewelry studio packed up inside her Airstream.
“A lot of people say they don’t have a creative bone in their body,” Anderson said. She begs to differ. “We are all artists; artists of our lives. The act of creating is an act of power, an act of hope.”
