Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Painful Beauty: Tlingit Women, Beadwork, and the Art of Resilience

Painful Beauty: Tlingit Women, Beadwork, and the Art of Resilience

Smetzer, Megan A.

Paperback

Series: Native Art of the Pacific Northwest: A Bill Holm Center

Native American HistoryGeneral United States HistoryIndigenous Art of the Americas

Publisher Price: $34.95

ISBN10: 0295754087
ISBN13: 9780295754086
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: Apr 8 2025
Pages: 240
Weight: 1.45
Height: 0.80 Width: 7.00 Depth: 9.90
Language: English

Winner of the 2024 Charles C. Eldredge Prize by the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Showcases the vibrant practices of Tlingit women's beadwork

For over 150 years, Tlingit women artists have beaded colorful, intricately beautiful designs on moccasins, dolls, octopus bags, tunics, and other garments. Painful Beauty suggests that at a time when Indigenous cultural practices were actively being repressed, beading supported cultural continuity, demonstrating Tlingit women's resilience, strength, and power. Beadwork served many uses, from the ceremonial to the economic, as women created beaded pieces for community use and to sell to tourists. Like other Tlingit art, beadwork reflects rich artistic visions with deep connections to the environment, clan histories, and Tlingit worldviews. Contemporary Tlingit artists Alison Bremner, Chloe French, Shgen Doo Tan George, Lily Hudson Hope, Tanis S'eiltin, and Larry McNeil foreground the significance of historical beading practices in their diverse, boundary-pushing artworks.

Working with museum collection materials, photographs, archives, and interviews with artists and elders, Megan Smetzer reframes this often overlooked artform as a site of historical negotiations and contemporary inspirations. She shows how beading gave Tlingit women the freedom to innovate aesthetically, assert their clan crests and identities, support tribal sovereignty, and pass on cultural knowledge. Painful Beauty is the first dedicated study of Tlingit beadwork and contributes to the expanding literature addressing women's artistic expressions on the Northwest Coast.

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