A week after Doug Ford (our provincial version of Trump, in every sense of the word) handily won the premiership of Ontario for a third time in a row, and within days of the announcement that some fucking banker was taking over as the new prime minister of Canada, I was in the National Gallery of Canada looking confused. I looked like this because I thought they had put a J-cloth, smeared in oil, behind a glass case and called it art. But then I looked closer—it took me a minute, but I noticed the material before the stiffness. I noticed that what I thought were those trademark zig-zaggy blue and white cellulose fibers were actually countless little blue and white glass beads, so expertly sewn together that this sculpture looked like any number of scrunched-up kitchen rags I had seen in my mother’s house, including the smears (oil paint; I had to look at the description to confirm that part). I think I laughed when I realized what I was looking at. I then felt an extreme urge to talk to everyone around me about it. All of this felt like how you’re supposed to feel with art, a kind of unexpected delight but also a desire to share it. It was something about the simple execution, the perfect transformation of this everyday object into layers of meaning I didn’t quite understand, wrapped in a trompe l’oeil punchline.
The piece was called Bang On Man!!! and it was made by Nico Williams, a Montreal-based Anishinaabe artist I had never heard of, despite him having won the Sobey award, one of Canada’s largest arts prizes ($100,000), last year. A few of his other pieces also blew me away—a pair of beaded lotto tickets and a pair of beaded grocery store coupons, most notably—but the J-cloth was my favorite. Apparently, it’s the third in a series, each J-cloth building on a different recollection.
“The work was inspired by memories of going into the garage on the rez where my uncle worked on cars. There would be an oily rag on the side of a bucket. Hunted deer were hung up, and cars were getting repaired in the same setting,” Williams has said of the series. “I’m always trying to go back to little nostalgic moments and memories. And I get excited when people can take it in many other directions and make different associations. I try to give a narrative to each beaded sculpture because there are many layers behind them.”
What makes Williams most excited is when people get tricked by his work, and in a way it’s weird I was so caught off guard because I should have been primed for this kind of trompe-beadwork. I had literally just seen my first three examples in a gallery a couple of days before.
This gallery, the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, was in Quebec City, which is about six hours by train from Ottawa. I was in the city for my birthday. It was cold as fuck. I would have gone to the gallery anyway, but because it was so cold I was in there a while. The first beadwork I saw came towards the end of my visit, that’s how I know how hard it hit me. Because by that point, after so much art work, so many rooms, so many floors, I had art fatigue—I was kind of going through the motions to keep from going outside. And then, not unlike with that J-cloth, I saw this piece on one of the far walls beyond the rest of the work that just stuck out for its beautiful simplicity. It was a black canvas, and in the middle of it was what looked like one of those microscope images of microbes, in this case a bunch of sparkling pinky-violet oblong cells on a tangerine backdrop, all of it rendered in intricate beading. Right below it in cursive script: “Tuberculosis.” To the right was a glass case containing a white surgical mask, but in place of breathing valves were several yellow and blue beaded circles which appeared to be their own viruses. The colorful beading made the mask look like those cow skulls you see hanging on the wall of countless homes in classic westerns.
I couldn’t read these pieces as thoroughly as I wanted to—I am not well-read enough in the history of Indigenous art and textiles—but I wasn’t so ignorant I couldn’t poke at some of the depths. I knew that colonizers had introduced a slew of diseases into the Indigenous population when they came to Canada. I also knew that beads made up a lot of Indigenous ceremonial dress. I figured the meaning lay somewhere in the mess of colonial history, in the glory and beauty of cultural resilience, both of which had somehow been titrated into these fragments of poetry that were powerful enough to break through my lack of knowledge.
“Beads and viruses go hand-in-hand; new diseases and goods that traders brought to the Americas,” it states on the website of Ruth Cuthand, the artist behind both of those pieces. The mask was part of her Covid-19 Mask series (in which various masks show various different beaded viruses), while the beaded tuberculosis was part of her Reserving series, which included everything from smallpox (which spread through the Indigenous population in the 19th century) to SARS (a much newer scourge). “I think the process of ‘budding,’ in which a disease replicates and exhausts the energy of its host cell, as analogous to the process of colonization,” Cuthand said in an interview from 2015. “‘Beading’ is different. It is an activity of survival. It is a means of remembering tradition and of feeling well.”
A Cree artist who was born in Saskatchewan, Cuthand has been mixing art and science since the beginning, when she started as an 8-year-old making work using the discarded orange paper from the polaroid chest X-rays she and her classmates got for their annual tuberculosis screenings. Cuthand won the highest honor an artist can win in Canada—the Governor General Award—in 2020 and at the time, Jake Moore, director of art galleries and collections at the University of Saskatchewan, said, “The most important artists in Canada right now are Indigenous.” I would hazard to say the most important artists in Canada were always Indigenous, it’s just that they are only now being celebrated by its institutions. Cuthand notes on her site that she intentionally started incorporating beadwork in her pieces because it had for so long been “denied status as serious art.”
Once I saw those first beaded artworks, it’s like they kept popping up everywhere, each one more striking than the one before. In that same gallery in Quebec I saw an arresting piece by Michael Patten called Native Beating, which looked like a white baseball bat dripping in blood. The Anishinaabe artist, also based out of Montreal, had covered the bat in white glass beads, delicately weaving through blood-red beads in the shape of the map of Canada. In the Ottawa gallery, after the Williams work, I lingered in front of a piece by Catherine Blackburn called But There’s No Scar?, in which what looks like a multicolored beaded bruise blooms in the middle of a stretched white canvas. The artist from Saskatchewan’s English River First Nation calls it a “wearable bruise” on her site, explaining, “the act of adornment – as a labour of love – becomes beaded armour for the wearer by both protecting and transfiguring grief, trauma and loss into celebration, empowerment and resurgence.”
While writing this, I noticed that in fact the Indigenous work I had seen in Quebec originated in a gallery near my home in Toronto (the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario). I like the idea of all of these beads stretching back and forth across the country, a kind of connective tissue I wasn’t even aware of. It was heartening to think of this invisible network in a time when everything seems to be moving further and further apart. But that connectedness is embedded into the work itself. “I just want people to be dazzled by the fact that we’re continuing the work of our ancestors, that they’ve been working with beads for a long, long, long time,” Williams told the CBC last year, noting that he includes in-jokes in his work for his own community—which made me think back to my spontaneous laughter after looking at his piece. “We go through a lot of trauma, but we use humour to sort of move past it. So if there’s that laughter, you know the joke there. It’s wonderful.”
