CWU Professor of Jewelry, Metals and Design joins NYC Jewelry Week panel

In a year that has presented him with a slew of successes the world over, CWU Distinguished Professor of Jewelry, Metals, and Design Keith Lewis has found another way of giving back to his craft.

On Friday, November 22, he was invited to join the Second Acts: Falling for Contemporary Jewelry panel at the annual NYC Jewelry Week in New York City. The panel featured artists who’d found their way to jewelry from drastically different careers. In Lewis’ case, that career was a seven-year stint as an analytical chemist.

When he first went to college, Lewis was convinced that his future lay in chemistry and made it halfway through a doctorate in the field before he realized that he wasn’t actually enjoying himself very much. His day job of processing seawater into usable compounds for manufacturing antacid tablets was doing less and less to capture his passion.

“Somewhere in the middle of all that, I started making jewelry and got really interested in it as a strategy for personalizing my narrative, particularly about the issues facing me and the entire LGBTQ+ community,” Lewis said. “After putting together a little studio in my apartment, I realized I cared a lot more about that than extracting magnesium from seawater.”

Lewis was deeply involved in community-based work in the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and he discovered that jewelry was the perfect outlet for him to express the deep, complex emotions that this time period brought out in the LGBTQ+ community as a whole.

Seeing a new north star for his career, Lewis went back to school at Kent State University to pursue a master’s degree in jewelry and metalsmithing at the age of 30. Ever since then, he’s been busily making his mark in the field.

“There’s this thing that happens later in your career where you start seeing secondary evidence of your impact in the world,” Lewis said. “For an artist, being part of a museum’s permanent collection is good proof that what you’ve done matters.”

Lewis’ work has, over the years, been featured at the Yale Museum, the Smithsonian Museum of the Arts, and the Memphis Metals Museum, among others. He has been part of the international conversation around jewelry, presenting a book talk on his own monograph at Munich Jewelry Week earlier this year, and contributing to other printed works in the field.

NYC Jewelry Week produces content, events, and strategic initiatives all year, in addition to hosting its annual Jewelry Week event, which was held November 18-24 this year. The organization prides itself on supporting deep discussion and broad exploration within the world of jewelry. Lewis was invited to participate in the Second Acts panel by Jennifer Altman, a journalist with writing credits for the Huffington Post and The New York Times.

Looking back on his journey to becoming a world-renowned artist and craftsman, Lewis credits his college experiences with teaching him to learn. By keeping an open mind and learning to absorb all kinds of new information, he has found ways to adapt to the changes his long, storied career has thrown at him.