04/18/2026
Art can reflect, honor, and draw attention. Art can celebrate and inform. Check out this work of art and read about the process, mission, and artist.
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Not a single bee was harmed to make it.
Her name is Luci Jockel. She is an American jewelry and metalsmithing artist based in Philadelphia, and what she created is one of the most extraordinary works of art you have probably never heard of.
It is called the Gold Veil.
The idea began when Jockel was studying mourning attire at the RISD Museum and came across something quiet and heartbreaking — workers cleaning a dead colony of honey bees from the museum's roof. The bees had not survived the winter. Jockel looked at those wings and saw something other people had swept away as waste.
She saw a way to honor them.
She reached out to beekeepers asking a simple question — had they lost their hives? One beekeeper, Paul Whewell, had lost his entire colony to a particularly harsh winter. He gave Jockel the wings. In return, she gave him her labor, helping him rebuild his colony from scratch. Through that exchange, she learned sustainable beekeeping from the inside — and continued it at home with her own father's hives.
She also collected wings from hives on the rooftops of the MAD Museum and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, tended by beekeeper Bruce Gifford. Bees across all these hives had perished from cold weather, mites, pesticides, and other natural causes. Every wing came from a bee that had already died. No bee was ever harmed for the sake of the art.
Then came the work itself.
Wing by wing. Archival glue. Patience measured in months. 20,000 wings in total, arranged with the precision and care of lace-making, building a veil long enough to drape over a human figure.
But Jockel did not do it alone. Reflecting the very nature of what she was honoring, she assembled a human "hive" — family members and friends working together — to help construct the Gold Veil. Just as a real bee colony depends on the cooperation of thousands of workers, so did the piece. That detail alone transforms the veil from a beautiful object into a living idea.
The result is breathtaking. The wings catch light the way gold does, translucent and shimmering, delicate enough to seem impossible. It looks as though it should not exist. That is the point.
The Gold Veil is a ceremony of mourning and a call for attention at the same time. Honey bees pollinate 85% of all vegetation on Earth. They are not just insects. They are infrastructure. Without them, the food systems that billions of people depend on begin to collapse. And yet 42% of bee colonies in the United States alone collapsed in a single recent year — lost to pesticides, parasites, habitat loss, and changing weather.
Jockel's work places that loss directly in front of you, in the most intimate way possible — wearing it.
Her art is recognized at the highest levels. She holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, was shortlisted for the American Craft Council Emerging Voices Award in 2019, and has been featured in Metalsmith Magazine and American Craft Magazine. The Smithsonian American Art Museum recognizes her work, and her pieces are held in collections including the RISD Museum and galleries in New Jersey and the Netherlands. She currently teaches Metalsmithing and Jewelry at Towson University, where she continues to shape how the next generation of artists thinks about materials, ethics, and the natural world.
What Luci Jockel built is not just a veil made of wings. It is a question worn on the body.
How much have we already lost without noticing? And what does it cost to pay attention before it is too late?
~Weird Wonders and Facts
