Taylor Saleem casts delicate dogwood blossoms in silver. She saws away at thin sheets of metal, conjuring the forms of birds and botanicals. She strings beads and sets turquoise. Each piece she makes reveals an aspect of her story.
Saleem, who is from Alton, is the owner of Taylor Saleem Jewelry. She grew up in a bi-racial family with a Black father and a white mother. “I [used to] code-switch—I could fit in with this group or that group,” she says of her childhood. “I didn’t recognize that there was anything unique about me and my racial background until college.”
Get a weekly dose of home and style inspiration
Subscribe to the St. Louis Design+Home newsletter to explore the latest stories from the local interior design, fashion, and retail scene.
But as a student at Saint Louis University in the early aughts, where she didn’t see many people who looked like her, Saleem experienced an identity crisis: “I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere in the world.”
What she thought was misplaced passion contributed to her angst. The first in her family to attend a four-year university, Saleem felt pressure to make her parents proud—and major in something that would net her a stable, well-paying job. She chose political science, thinking that law school might be a good path, and interned for then–Illinois Senator Barack Obama. Still, she felt the tug to pursue something creative. She got a job at Bead It, in the St. Louis Mills mall, assuring the manager that, yes, she could do the four or five different beading techniques the gig required—“and then I had to go to the library and figure it out.” She learned, mostly from the hobbyists who shopped there. When she started exhibiting her own work at craft shows, her husband, Joshua Saleem, bought her displays and paid for her first class at a metal studio. “I was intrigued by using fire,” she says, “to manipulate metal but also to make it look feminine.”
By then, Saleem was working a day job as a community organizer. She wasn’t assertive enough for the role, she admits. She was offered the choice to take severance pay or go on probation. “I thought, I can either stay here and be miserable or I can go down a different path,” she says. “I took severance and I walked away. That was a Friday. On Monday, I baked muffins with my daughter, and I set up my studio.”
Now that story is reflected in her work. “That’s why I love flowers,” she says. “They can stand alone, but when they’re together, that’s where the magic is. They’re delicate. They’re sensitive, like I am.”
A typical day for Saleem begins with son Bill, 7, waking her with a hug. (Her daughter, Naomi, is now 10.) Once the kids are settled and she’s had two cups of coffee, she goes to work either in her mint-colored studio, on the home’s main floor, or in her basement, which houses her kiln and centrifugal caster. To make those dogwood blooms, Saleem pours plaster over flowers set in a mold and fires them in her kiln; the organic matter burns up, leaving a cavity in the plaster. She then inserts the plaster mold into the centrifugal caster and melts silver in the machine’s crucible. The release of a pin frees the liquid silver, which is then pulled, as the machine spins, into the mold.
Saleem’s designs are studded with sapphire and turquoise. She finds those colors soothing. She also uses diamonds, in reference to a favorite quote, from the Robert Penn Warren novel All the King’s Men: “There’s a part where he says, ‘A diamond ain’t a thing in the world but dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington.’”
Just as Saleem finds inspiration in that quote, her customers see their stories in her jewelry. “I say ‘but also,’” she says. “I’m 54 percent European but also 46 percent African ancestry. I don’t have to be one thing or the other. Other people are able to say, ‘I’m a mom, but I’m also a writer.’ Or, ‘I’m having trouble conceiving, but I don’t have to be focused on that—I’m also a good sister and a loving daughter.’ I’m continuing to write my story and help others see theirs.”
