Put a Bead On It

Hawaii, the most remote archipelago on the planet, is only home to a few hundred species, all of which reached the isolated paradise thanks to chance. A whopping 75 percent of the island chain's now-native flowering plants actually got there in seed form, thanks to birds. In other cases, cyclones ripped through South Pacific islands with such force that they actually uprooted seeds and eggs from their natural, born-here-all-my-life habitats, flinging them thousands of miles across the sea.

Though tiny—sometimes infuriatingly tiny, as anyone who's ever strung a necklace will tell you—beads are not, of course, transported as organically as, say, fruit flies, but they too have unlikely origin stories. Like seeds and larvae, beads have crisscrossed the earth for millennia, destined to be embedded, literally and figuratively, into the fabric of where they land. So how do Murano glass beads from Venice, for example, end up on a headdress in Wyoming? In the vast majority of cases, we'll never know specifics, but we can still learn a lot about a culture by studying how its artisans decorated their sacred items.

The Museum of International Folk Art's show Beadwork Adorns the World, which opens this Sunday, was curated by Marsha Bol, who also authored the exhibit's accompanying book. During a recent visit to the museum, Director Khristaan Villela and Curator of Textiles and Dress Carrie Hertz led me into a storage room where nearly 250 items were carefully tagged and arranged, ready for installation.

The excitement surrounding a show of this scale, which has been three years in the making and will be up through early 2019, is contagious. "We pretty much covered the entire globe," Hertz says, "but wanted to group things according to theme, not region." This means a stone-encrusted silver necklace from Iran might be displayed next to a hammered silver necklace of Mexican origin.

Been to Sarawak? Me neither. It's a region in Borneo, home to a tribe called the Iban, who live along the water in communal longhouses. Along with fantastically ornate ikat textiles, beadwork is a specialty of the Iban. A particularly jaw-dropping display features a 20th-century wedding costume comprised of hundreds of strands of draped beads, threaded to form colorful patterns; at its center is a strip of semi-opaque, tube-shaped carnelian beads, most likely from India. The item's "train" is a long panel which runs vertically down the bride's back, its bottom border sewn with bells which clang noisily, announcing her arrival. It's impressively ornate, and also must be super heavy and somewhat unwieldy to wear. "There are actually stories," Hertz remarks, "of brides sinking boats because they were so weighted down with beads."

African artwork—which, incidentally, is woefully undershown in Santa Fe—is marvelously represented here. A mid-20th century Nigerian fly whisk, covered in mind-boggling arrangements of rainbow-hued beads, is topped with a tuft of horse hair, and though the object is nominally functional, it's also symbolic. Yoruba leaders would use it as a sort of wand-like instrument, urging followers to speak up, or simply to indicate authority. A Zulu outfit from Durban, South Africa, on loan from the Fowler Museum at UCLA, includes a 7-foot-long headdress.

"It was designed and worn by Zulu rickshaw pullers after the city government required them to wear uniforms," Hertz explains. "I love that the workers transformed this edict into an opportunity for creative grandiosity, inventing something flamboyant, but nevertheless inspired by traditional Zulu design."

Those of us familiar with Southwestern Pueblo jewelry have seen the delicate, whisper-thin heishe beads typical of regional tribes, but we may not be as aware of Plains Indians beadwork traditions. A pair of baby moccasins, thought to be from the Cheyenne or Lakota nations, is meticulously patterned with seed beads, which cover even the soles of the shoes. According to Bol's text, moccasins this extravagant were indicators of an especially beloved child, whose status was announced during a Hunka ceremony. "This lifetime designation committed the favored child to take personal responsibility throughout its life for the welfare of others," she writes.

The material most synonymous with beads is surely glass, and that's plentiful here, but there are also sequins, drilled bones and cowry shells. There are beads made of coins, coral and even whole cloves. Accouterments of course include thread and rope, but also tanned hide, leopard fangs, orangutan teeth and elephant tail hair. Something that seems to be consistent across multiple traditions is the use of brilliant, bold color. "In many cultures, white is worn during mourning—but color," Hertz says, "is life."

What makes this show so genuinely compelling is that it encourages us not only to learn more about other people, but also to question what we know—or, more probably, what we think we know about cultures other than our own. Before process or even style, Beadwork Adorns the World is concerned with people, each of whom, after all, contain their own mysterious, colorful universes.

The show will be up for almost a year, so take a quiet Sunday (or the first Sunday of the month, when all four of Museum Hill's organizations are free to New Mexico residents) to stroll through. The museum, which is the largest of its kind in the world, hosts rotating exhibits as well as the truly extraordinary permanent installation of globe-spanning objects collected by artist and designer Alexander Girard.

Beadwork Adorns the World Opening Day:
10 am-5 pm Sunday April 22. $6-$12.
Museum of International Folk Art,
706 Camino Lejo,
476-1204.
Through Feb. 3, 2019.