Beadwork is the art or craft of attaching beads to one another by stringing them onto a thread or thin wire with a sewing or beading needle or sewing them to cloth. Beads are produced in a diverse range of materials, shapes, and sizes, and vary by the kind of art produced. Most often, beadwork is a form of personal adornment, but it also commonly makes up other artworks.
Christi Marlene Belcourt is a Canadian visual artist and author. She is best known for her acrylic paintings which depict floral patterns inspired by Métis and First Nations historical beadwork art. Belcourt's work often focuses on questions around identity, culture, place and divisions within communities.
The visual arts of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas encompasses the visual artistic practices of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas from ancient times to the present. These include works from South America and North America, which includes Central America and Greenland. The Siberian Yupiit, who have great cultural overlap with Native Alaskan Yupiit, are also included.
Juanita Growing Thunder Fogarty is a Native American, Assiniboine Sioux bead worker and porcupine quill worker. She creates traditional Northern Plains regalia.
Martha Berry is a Cherokee beadwork artist, who has been highly influential in reviving traditional Cherokee and Southeastern beadwork, particularly techniques from the pre-Removal period. She has been recognized as a Cherokee National Treasure and is the recipient of the Seven Star Award and the Tradition Bearer Award. Her work is shown in museums around the United States.
Teri Greeves is a Native American beadwork artist, living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is enrolled in the Kiowa Indian Tribe of Oklahoma.
Richard Aitson was a Kiowa-Kiowa Apache bead artist, curator, and poet from Oklahoma.
Ralph Tracy "Ted" Coe was a notable art collector and scholar, best known for developing modern appreciation of Native American art. "He was kind of the beginning player, enormously significant in the growth of appreciation of Native American art in the 20th century", noted a curator from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His collection of over 2,000 objects of Indigenous art form the basis of the Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts collection holdings.
Marcelle Sharron Ahtone Harjo is a Kiowa painter from Oklahoma. Her Kiowa name, Sain-Tah-Oodie, translates to "Killed With a Blunted Arrow." In the 1960s and 1970s, she and sister Virginia Stroud were instrumental in the revival of ledger art, a Plains Indian narrative pictorial style on paper or muslin.
Joyce J. Scott is an African-American artist, sculptor, quilter, performance artist, installation artist, print-maker, lecturer and educator. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016, and a Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019, Scott is best known for her figurative sculptures and jewelry using free form, off-loom beadweaving techniques, similar to a peyote stitch. Each piece is often constructed using thousands of glass seed beads or pony beads, and sometimes other found objects or materials such as glass, quilting and leather. In 2018, she was hailed for working in new medium — a mixture of soil, clay, straw, and cement — for a sculpture meant to disintegrate and return to the earth. Scott is influenced by a variety of diverse cultures, including Native American and African traditions, Mexican, Czech, and Russian beadwork, illustration and comic books, and pop culture.
Martina Vigil Montoya (1856–1916) was a ceramics painter from San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico. She frequently collaborated with her husband and partner Florentino Montoya. They introduced new techniques and materials to other potters. Julian Martinez often copied their designs and in 1895 Maria Martinez called Martina the finest contemporary potter. They moved from San Ildefonso to Cochiti Pueblo, the birthplace of Martina's father, between 1902 and 1905. While the bentonite slip employed in Cochiti pottery gave it a soapy appearance, Southwestern ceramics expert Jonathan Batkin considers the Montoyas' work from this period to be stylistically San Ildefonso. She's known for being the primary instructor of her niece Tonita Peña.
Les Berryhill is a Native American artist focusing on beadwork. He lives in Edmond, Oklahoma and is a member of the Yuchi and Muscogee tribes.
Emily Waheneka (1919-2008) was a Native American artist, of Warm Springs, Wasco and Paiute tribal heritage.
Jamie Okuma is a Native American visual artist and fashion designer from California. She is known for beadwork, mixed-media soft sculpture, and fashion design. She is Luiseño, Wailaki, Okinawan, and Shoshone-Bannock. She is also an enrolled member of the La Jolla band of Indians in Southern California where she is currently living and working.
Imogene Goodshot Arquero is an Oglala Lakota beadwork artist from South Dakota, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Jackie Larson Bread is a Native American beadwork artist from the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Montana. Her interest in bead work was sparked from looking at her late-grandmother's beaded pieces. In awe of these objects, Bread self-taught herself how to bead when she was younger and now, she has been beading for more than 20 years. Continuing through trial and error, Bread has received numerous awards for her beading.
TahneeAhtoneharjo-Growingthunder, is a Kiowa beadwork artist, regalia maker, curator, and museum professional of Muscogee and Seminole descent, from Mountain View, Oklahoma.
Alice Littleman was a Kiowa beadwork artist and regalia maker, who during her lifetime was recognized as one of the leading Kiowa beaders and buckskin dressmakers. Her works are included in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Southern Plains Indian Museum, and the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Nellie Two Bears Gates was a Native American artist whose beadwork depicted Yanktonai Dakota history and culture. Beaded suitcases and valises that she gave as gifts are now part of art collections and exhibitions.
Katrina Mitten is a Native American artist. She is enrolled in the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma.
