The Jewelry Collaboration Channeling Our Era of Anxiety

WHEN LizWorks founder Liz Swig approached the American artist and filmmaker Rashid Johnson in January about a jewelry collaboration, she could little imagine that by summer, Johnson's frenzied Anxious Men drawings-on which she's based a collection of cuffs, ring bands, signet rings, and military tags, available this month-would become a startlingly effective shorthand for the national mood Since 2014, Swig has partnered with the likes of Kara Walker and Cindy Sherman to offer porcelain tableware, cameo jewelry, and other objets d'art through LizWorks, her creative platform, and after asking seven women artists to reimagine the charm bracelet in 2016, "I wanted to explore male energy in the realm of jewelry," Swig says She found a good way in through Anxious Men, a rare experiment in figuration for Johnson.

Reconciling themes of mental health, Black identity, and contemporary urban life, his sketchlike portraits-originally made from black soap and wax on tile and displayed at the Drawing Center in New York in 2015-were "Complex enough and approachable enough at the same time," says Swig For his own part, Johnson liked the idea of miniaturizing and mobilizing his typically oversize compositions "Some of the things that my work speaks to essentially travel with you, quite literally on your person, like issues of anxiety and fear," Johnson says, "And some of the works function as illustrations of those concepts and, in some ways, as cathartic objects.

So to make them wearable reminders-that was something I was interested in." . Source