Teri Greeves, NDN Art, 2008. Size 13 cut beads, glass beads, brain-tanned deer hide, cotton.Don Hall, Courtesy MacKenzie Art Gallery
The exhibition Radical Stitch, a collection of contemporary Indigenous beadwork, is filled with ironic takes on the medium. For example, the Kiowa artist Teri Greeves, from Sante Fe, N.M., contributes NDN Art, a figure in a feather warbonnet with a speech bubble that reads “ART” all carefully stitched together in fine beadwork. The cheeky image – in part a reference to Roy Lichenstein’s 1962 pop painting of the word art – asks whether Indigenous crafts (which often sold stereotypical imagery to settler audiences) can be integrated into Western notions of fine art. That seems to sum up this provocative show.
Curated by Sherry Farrell Racette, Michelle LaVallee and Cathy Mattes for the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, where it is now stopping in the midst of a large national tour, Radical Stitch is founded on traditional beading of breathtaking artistry, but its point is these more political approaches. (Much of the work uses seed beads, those tiny glass beads that are sewn together to fashion a flat surface for decorative purposes – and can be used to create almost any representational effect.) In the first room, Radical Stitch includes The Lady, a show-stopping women’s outfit of coat, hat, muff and boots, based on traditional Métis mens’ dress and made by the award-winning Manitoba beader Jennine Krauchi: The signature Métis smoking cap tops a black fur-trimmed coat with powerful vertical passages of floral beading down the front and back while the muff sports a central floral design and fringes of red yarn.
Kristen Auger, nîpihkân pimâtisiwin: Flower Life, 2016. Mixed media.Lawrence Cook/Indigenous Art Collection
Similarly, nîpihkân pimâtisiwin: Flower Life is a spectacular 2016 creation by the much younger Cree artist Kristen Auger, featuring panels of meticulously reproduced flowers, leaves and berries and inspired by the ceremonial hoods worn by Cree women around James Bay.
Skawennati, Intergalactic Empowerment Wampum Belt (Onkwehón:we, Na'vi, Skyworlder, LGM, Overlord), 2017. Assorted Czech glass beads, leather, artificial sinew, nail polish.NGC-L.COOK/National Gallery Of Canada
Aside from Krauchi’s gender spin, these pieces are mainly a testament to the remarkable technical talent required to keep traditional beadwork artistically alive. But much of the work in this show then uses that technique to thematic effect. In a glass case right near Krauchi’s coat is a modern-day wampum belt created by Skawennati, the multimedia Mohawk artist based in Montreal: the Intergalactic Empowerment Wampum Belt features her own cast of Indigenous sci-fi superheroes (who have also appeared in her computer-generated video work), mixing the historical power of the belts as contracts, awards or gifts with contemporary pop and digital culture. Meanwhile, Marcus Amerman, a Choctaw artist from New Mexico, reproduces a historic photograph of a beader bent over his work – entirely in beading.
Amerman is one of many artists here to recognize the relationship between beading and photography and the most subtle in playing on it. More humorously, Toronto artist Catherine Blackburn simply uses perler beads, those toy-store plastic beads you can lay out in a pattern and then melt together to secure your picture, revealing how beadwork is a form of pixillation as it creates pictures with dot patterns. For her part, Nadia Myre goes straight to photography itself and offers the viewer high-quality digital prints of beading such as the mandala-like Boundaries (2019) in this show. She can use this approach to take delicate beading to monumental proportions as if to stress its cultural importance: For those who cannot speak: the land, the water, the animals and the future generations (2013) is a huge horizontal photograph of black and white beading inspired by wampum belts that belongs to the National Gallery’s permanent collection and coincidentally is hanging just outside the exhibition.
The Montreal-based Algonquin artist is one of several prominent contemporary Canadian artists known for using beads in conceptual pieces. She is also represented by a collapsible tobacco barrel made of long, pale ceramic beads. Ruth Cuthand is best known for her beaded images of the deadly viruses and bacteria that Europeans introduced to the continent. Here she is represented by newer work in which she again uses beads to reproduce the MRI images of brains belonging to people suffering from depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder and mania.
Margaret Nazon, The Light Echo, 2012. Beads on textile.Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre
Meanwhile, in the Northwest Territories, Gwich’in artist Margaret Nazon reproduces images from the Hubble telescope in beads, restoring the twinkle that is missing from the photography to amplify the beauty of the stars.
Nico Williams, Mnidnoominehnsuk | Spirit Berries, 2018. Glass beads.Lawrence Cook/Indigenous Art Collection
Perhaps the most brash of these smart juxtapositions of modernity and tradition is offered by Nico Williams, an Anishnaabe artist working in Montreal, whose three-dimensional beaded sculptures include reproductions of consumer goods such as an Amazon shopping bag and a soiled J-Cloth.
The effect may seem merely provocative but glass beads were always part of cross-cultural commerce – and were not made in North America: They were first produced on the Venetian island of Murano, brought here by Europeans to exchange for pelts and incorporated into Indigenous art alongside wampum beads and quillwork. Wampum, painstakingly fashioned from pierced shell, was so valuable in trade and diplomacy that the French even tried manufacturing imitation wampum from porcelain, while the Venetian glass beads gained the power of currency. The relationship is so direct that Cornaline d’Aleppo, Venetian beads produced by winding coloured glass around a white core, are sometimes known as Hudson Bay beads.
In that regard, although Radical Stitch is not a show about the history of beads, it is a crucial counterweight to the current Canada Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. There, artist Kapwani Kiwanga, taking inspiration from Venice’s history as a centre of the bead trade, covers the exterior and interior with bead curtains as well as fashioning sculptures that use the copper and palm oil once traded for mere beads. Kiwanga, whose father is Tanzanian, was born and raised in Canada but now lives in France where her work often concerns itself with Europe’s colonial relationship with Africa. In considering how Venice’s beads established different systems of economic value, she makes direct reference to the African trade: One of the sculptures inside the pavilion features tightly woven panels of loomed beading created by the Zimbabwean collective Marigold. But, oddly for a Canada Pavilion, the exhibition includes no parallel participation by Indigenous bead workers. If you want to know how those well-travelled glass beads are used in Turtle Island today, see Radical Stitch.
Radical Stitch continues at the National Gallery of Canada to Sept. 30 and tours to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton Nov. 30 to March 2.