Keith Lewis of Thorp, Washington, creates jewelry which deals with issues of sexual identity, memory, and loss and the notion of jewelry as a transportable polemic. It has been widely published and shown both nationally and internationally and is represented in a number of significant public and private collections, including the Tacoma Art Museum; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; the Rotasa Foundation, California; the Boardman Family Collection, California; the Porter/Price Collection, North Carolina; the Susan Beech Collection, California; the Museum of Arts and Design; the Smithsonian Institution; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Lewis received his BS in Chemistry from Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1981 and his MFA in Jewelry & Metalsmithing from Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, in 1993. He has been teaching at Central Washington University since 1994, where he is currently a distinguished professor.

“Lewis has had the courage to address issues of Queer identity and politics in his work as well as sexual freedom, politics, Gay male relationships, and larger questions about loss, memory, history, and our obligations to the past,” said ACC Awards Committee Member Susan Cummins. “These are areas jewelry has rarely approached so directly.”