One of Keyes’ pieces was designed around a green stone that came from an old piece of jewelry. One half of the ring is made of polished sterling silver while the other half features its oxidized form.
Madonna will stop in San Francisco for back-to-back shows at Chase Center this week, but her Celebration Tour has held close ties to the Bay Area ever since it launched last October.
Matanda Keyes, an Oakland-born visual and musical artist now based in Brooklyn, worked alongside Madonna’s team to design and handcraft jewelry for the worldwide tour. He designed pieces for Mercy James, one of Madonna’s daughters and the tour’s featured pianist, as well as Matthew Jamal, the tour’s featured cellist who reached out to Keyes with the project.
Made of sterling silver and recycled materials, Keyes’ jewelry pays homage to Madonna’s decadeslong musical career and New York City, where she got her start.
Some of his designs use a technique that involves wrapping a wire around bigger parts of a ring’s object, forming a fence-like structure. From there, Keyes hits the head with a torch so that the piece melts away and more natural shapes arise.
A prong setting on one ring, Keyes said, alludes to elegance and New York’s energy in the 1980s, when Madonna wasn’t yet a one-name superstar, while another ring offers contrast with one half made of fully polished sterling silver and the other half made of its half-oxidized form.
“This was the type of project that you don’t know what the final production is going to look like until it’s literally on the stage because everyone is working up to the last minute,” said Keyes, who used overnight shipping to get his pieces to London’s O2 Arena in time for the tour’s opening last fall.
“It’s kind of like a puzzle that you have to decode and everyone is working on multiples of things at once,” he said.
Keyes, 25, grew up in Oakland before moving to New York six years ago to attend the Manhattan School of Music on a full scholarship.
His creative journey began taking shape as a toddler, when Keyes said his father would blast Miles Davis on speakers as the two ran around their house. When he was 4, Keyes’ father bought him a drum set after noticing during a trip to Disneyland that his son would make rhythms out of any object that made noise. Keyes’ mother would give him papers and other pictures to cut up for art projects, and she also taught her son how to use a sewing machine.
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Keyes credits his immediate family and the Bay Area for cultivating his artistic career. Time spent in the Oakland Unified School District, as well as the Oaktown Jazz Workshop and the Oakland Symphony’s Eastside All-Star Jazz Ensemble, allowed Keyes to further study music. As a high-school student, Keyes was a percussionist in the SFJAZZ Center’s High School All-Stars Big Band and Combo between 2015 and 2017.
Rebeca Mauleón, SFJAZZ’s director of education, said Keyes was “a trendsetter, both in terms of the way he played, and also his fashion choices.” He once wore an ascot to a performance, which Mauleón said was a moment of recognition that students at Keyes’ age already had creative choices and wherewithal. The center wanted to hold space for that.
“He kind of helped us recalibrate our requirement for the students and what they would wear onstage,” Mauleón said.
Keyes began making jewelry four years ago and now operates out of a basement studio in a Brooklyn brownstone. His endeavor with Madonna’s tour launched his newest multimedia project, “Parsody,” a word Keyes made up to reflect the relationship between musical sounds and physical objects.
As he did with the Queen of Pop, Keyes will collaborate with musical artists in New York and the Bay Area for sets of specially designed pieces known as “capsules.” The pieces will be made primarily from recycled materials — jewelry, textiles and other found objects — and use fringe techniques such as spectroscopic imaging to share information on the elements and materials used in the process.
One of Keyes’ pieces was designed around a green stone that came from an old piece of jewelry. One half of the ring is made of polished sterling silver while the other half features its oxidized form.
Courtesy Matanda Keyes
Keyes said that as he builds on this new chapter in visual artistry, he is still keeping Oakland at the forefront of his creativity. The city’s history, he said, is baked into him on a subconscious level thanks to the stories his uncles, aunts and other family members shared as he was growing up.
Occasional trips to the Bay Area are in Keyes’ future. Mauleón told The Examiner that Keyes is now a faculty mentor for students when the SFJAZZ Center hosts free summer workshops. He is also an alumni ambassador, meaning that Keyes visits Bay Area schools when available so that young kids of color can see themselves represented in the program.
“I hope to bring the things that I gained from that back to Oakland when it’s time for me to do so,” Keyes said.
