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Beading Culture: Raised Beadwork and the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, exhibition at J ames Watrous Gallery, Overture Center for the Arts, Madison, WI, September 16 to November 6, 2016. Jody Clowes and Anne Pryor, Curators.
The James Watrous Gallery, part of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, regularly showcases the work of contemporary Wisconsin artists, and its exhibitions intentionally bridge perspectives from the arts and humanities. These themes came together powerfully in Beading Culture, which focused on the growing importance of raised beadwork in Oneida cultural and artistic life.
The Oneida were one of the tribes of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois confederacy (Six Nations League) of New York and southern Ontario (the other members were the Mohawk, Tuscarora, Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga). During the early 1800s, the state of New York and white land speculators forced the Oneida to sell large portions of their territories, and the majority of the tribe relocated to Wisconsin. The move was filled with controversy, as local Menominee and Ho-Chunk tribes questioned the treaties that gave them the land. The Wisconsin Oneida have been separated from their homeland and their broader cultural context for nearly two centuries and have long felt a yearning to be connected to their heritage.
The Haudenosaunee of New York and Canada developed a distinctive style of raised beadwork in the mid-nineteenth century, after the Oneida had migrated west. They used it for regalia and items for personal use but predominantly worked it onto small novelty items that were sold at tourist areas such as Niagara Falls. Pincushions, picture frames, miniature canoes, and other "whimsies" adorned with cheerful floral motifs were very popular souvenirs and became a critical source oftribal income by the 1880s. The items appealed to tourists as symbols of picturesque places and "vanishing" Indians. At the same time, they served as markers of native identity to their makers. Raised beadwork lost its economic significance by World War II, but it never completely died out. There was something of a revival among the eastern Haudenosaunee in the 1970s as part of a reclaiming of disrupted tradition and cultural heritage.
Beading...