Dead Souls

Since the late 1980s, American jeweler Keith Lewis (*1959) has been consistently tackling issues of Queer identity and politics in his figurative and narrative jewelry, including a groundbreaking series of memorial jewels addressing the impact of the AIDS crisis on himself and his community. Often witty, sometimes shocking, frequently erotic, and surprisingly moving, his jewelry is an act of remembering and witnessing, and a joyous assertion that desire and pleasure, wonderful ends in themselves, can collapse historical distance and connect the past and the present. Written by Damian Skinner and featuring four of Lewis’s artist talks documenting key preoccupations and series, this monograph surveys a bold, provocative, and ambitious body of work that deserves to be widely known.