Terry Castro, a New York-based jewelry designer whose talent for blending the fantastic with the elegant led him to sell on New York’s sidewalks to adorn celebrities like Rihanna and Steven Tyler, died July 18 at his home in Istanbul. He was 50.
The cause was a heart attack, said his son, Sir King Castro.
Mr. Castro, who worked under the name Castro, considered himself a ‘creator of dreams’. He scoured antiques and thrift stores for inspiration for his bold yet opulent pieces, which mixed animal and human forms, evoking African influences with medieval and galactic imagery. He only produced about 35 pieces a year, by hand, but he saw his work on the covers of Vogue Latin America, Forbes and Hamptons magazines, and in the 2013 feature film ‘Out of the Furnace’.
For Mr. Castro, jewelry was not just a fashion accessory. “He was more than an independent designer, he lived and worked as an artist,” says Nghi Nguyen, a Brooklyn jewelry designer and close friend. “His work can be categorized as high-art jewelry. It is a museum-quality wearable sculpture.”
It sometimes had prices to match. An antique bisque doll collar — part of his signature Dollies series, made from tiny porcelain dolls — with vibrating wings and a removable mask, as well as diamonds and other precious gems, recently sold for more than $100,000, Sir King Castro said in an interview. .
Friends said that as a largely self-taught black designer, Mr. Castro took pride in being an outsider in the world of fine jewelry. “The jewelry industry prides itself on the wealth of generations and access to materials and resources,” said Jules Kim, a friend and fellow jeweler. “People who aren’t born into it have to rely on whatever agency they have. Castro lived by creating his own traditions.”
Passionate and at times confrontational, Mr. Castro considered himself a rebel within the industry.
“I do what I want; you don’t like it, don’t buy it,” he said in a 2012 interview with The Black Nouveau, a style blog. Speaking of his scattered attempts to go ‘commercial’, he concluded that the income was not worth the creative price paid.
“My real bills are on me,” he said. “I was branded a traitor and now I’m back to the dark side. If you don’t have the strength, stay the fuck away from me.”
But instead, that uncompromising attitude seemed to draw people in.
In 2020, De Beers, one of the world’s largest diamond producers, teamed up with Hollywood activist group Red Carpet Advocacy to bring Mr. Castro and five other black designers in a campaign called #BlackisBrilliant. The campaign outfitted celebrities with jewelry containing ethically sourced diamonds from Botswana to wear at galas and awards ceremonies.
“We approached Castro to participate because just by looking at some of his locks and doll pieces, we knew he had a special talent,” wrote Sally Morrison, De Beers Group’s director of public relations for natural diamonds. an e-mail.
Last September, Sotheby’s showcased Mr. Castro’s work in an exhibition called “Brilliant & Black: A Jewelry Renaissance,” featuring 21 black designers. At the opening, in New York, “people literally danced into the exhibit and cried,” said Melanie Grant, a prominent jewelry writer who curated the show. And Mr. Castro, with his sociable disposition and charismatic presence, was a natural star of the show.
“It’s still hard for black designers to access top-tier collectors,” said Ms. Grant. “But I like to think we made a difference, and Castro was a big part of that.”
Terry Clifford Castro was born on January 26, 1972, in Toledo, Ohio, to Mary Castro, who sold antiques and collectibles, and a father he never knew. In 1989, his mother married Paul Geller, a lawyer.
In his youth, Mr. Castro ended up in a life on the street and spent a short time in prison, Sir King Castro said. In 1999, he married Belinda Castro (her last name happened to be the same as his). That same year, the couple had a son, whom they gave the grand-sounding name Sir King Raymundo Castro.
Mr Castro became interested in repairing jewelry after taking a weekend class, his former wife, now Belinda Strode, said in an interview. Eventually, he and his wife opened a small jewelry store called C&C Jewelers in Toledo, where he repaired and sold the work of other designers. Within a few years, he started designing his own jewelry, using scrap from a junkyard, his ex-wife said.
The marriage and the shop both turned out to be short-lived. In the early 2000s, Mr. Castro moved to Chicago, where he decided to turn his lifelong interest in fashion into a career, his half-brother, Aaron Geller, said in an interview.
He briefly ran his own clothing line in his adopted city, cutting an impressive figure in the techno clubs and fashion boutiques. “He always wore these marks on the back of his boots,” recalls Ayana Haaruun, a close friend from those years. “He thought he was so volatile. We used to call him Lenny Kravitz.”
In 2005, Mr. Castro moved to New York where he started his own jewelry line, Castro NYC, which he sold on the sidewalks of SoHo. His work caught the attention of fashion stylists and editors passing through, and before long he expanded the business and flew to fashion weeks in Europe and Japan to showcase his work.
As Mr. Castro grew in the industry, he continued to question assumptions about race. “I personally don’t think you can be black or African, and your work doesn’t reflect any part of Africa or Africanism, because we live in this world where we have to think about so many other things that other people don’t have. which I have to think about in a day,” he said in an interview with fashion website Magnus Oculus last year.
He also continued to challenge himself, following his insatiable curiosity and itinerant nature to move to Istanbul in 2016.
In addition to his son and half-brother, Mr. Castro leaves behind his mother and stepfather.
Although his work celebrated life in all its colors and complexity, death was always a subject of fascination for Mr. Castro; skulls, both animals and humans, were a common motif.
But his interest in the subject was not morbid. “With the skull itself, it’s in you, it’s part of you, it’s part of life, but also of death,” he said in the Magnus Oculus interview. “In some black people, they’ll see a skull and they’ll say, ‘Oh God, it’s voodoo and evil,’ and I’ll say, ‘Well, that means you’re bad too, because you’ve got a skull inside. your head. You’re walking around with that thing.’”