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Two new beadwork exhibits coming to Spokane's Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture

The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture will soon have two beadwork exhibits. One focuses on historical beadwork from the Plateau Tribes. The second, which is open now, is a collection of works created by a collective of South African artists.

Kayla Tackett, the director of exhibitions and collections at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, said the African designs are a mix of sizes and motifs created by a collective of Xhosa and Zula women.

“So Ubuhle is actually a collective of artists who do beadwork,” Tackett said. “Sometimes they're memorializing their lost sisters, sometimes they're memorializing family members, or talking about the joys of friendship.”

Tackett said the collection ranges from abstract images to artwork inspired by cultural significant animals, such as bulls.

“The ndwango’s are black cloth that are heavily beaded and then stretched over a frame,” she said. “From afar, they look like paintings, you see these fields of color and as you get closer you start seeing the textures of the beads and you start seeing shapes and forms, and it can be sort of abstract and figural and it really rewards looking at the pieces for a little while. But they're beautiful, they shimmer in the light and they have these really profound stories associated with them.”

The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture will also host an exhibit of beadwork created by the Columbia River Plateau tribes. The exhibit will feature more than 80 pieces from the collection of Fred L. Mitchell.

Mitchell, who is from Walla Walla, has amassed hundreds of pieces of beadwork, and more than 1,000 photographs cataloguing the history of the collection.

Tisa Matheson, the American Indian Collection Curator for the MAC and a member of the Nez Perce tribe, said one of the pieces in the collection, a century old cradle, is one of the more beautiful examples of intricate beadwork.

The pattern -- blue and yellow flowers bordered with pink, green and red -- is vibrant. Like many other pieces in the collection, it’s also very well preserved

Matheson said the intricacy is only part of why the piece is important.

“This is one of the items that Fred (Mitchell) has paired with a historical image,” Matheson said. “That's one of the real significant characteristics of his collection is he really tries to pair the historical image with the object. It humanizes it, instead of saying ‘oh, something really pretty an Indian made,’ it really humanizes the culture and how it was used.”

Most of Mitchell’s collection is practical items, such as clothing, or regalia and bags. Matheson said the collection also shows historically what was happening at the times the pieces were made, and the full range of influences and art styles practiced across the region.

“I think it’s just he appreciated the art form,” she said, “which really emphasizes a lot of pictorials of animals, birds, florals, a lot of pictorials of native women, native men, that really shows the artistry of the format.”

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence, will run from now until April 30. The Plateau Pictorial Beadwork Collection: The Fred L. Mitchell Collection opens Sunday and runs until May 14.

Rebecca White is a 2018 graduate of Edward R Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University. She's been a reporter at Spokane Public Radio since February 2021. She got her start interning at her hometown paper The Dayton Chronicle and previously covered county government at The Spokesman-Review.