Lia Musante

Lia Musante is a maker working in Philadelphia. Since their undergraduate studies in community-based oral history, they seek to link embodied storytelling with metalsmithing, using jewelry as a worn archive, and teaching in accessible art education.

Lia plays with the lifetimes objects carry to re-forge narratives of possibility. Forgotten detritus reunites with the body as sentimental jewels as part of the cycle in which man-made objects are made, found, and remade. Jewelry externalizes inner feelings, as hardware for tenderness. But this two-ness is slippery: at times the object outlasts fleeting feelings, or the feelings linger far after the object expires. By teasing apart this connection with repaired electronics, faux stones, steel, and sound, these re-linkings and re-contextualizations remember the everpresent kinship we share with our belongings and each other in the end times.