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Artist makes critical statement with beadwork

TULSA, Okla. – Native beadwork artists are proud of their skills when dancers wear their work at powwows. Molly Murphy Adams knows the feeling, but you’re more likely to see her craft in an art gallery.
The Tulsa bead worker from Montana is finishing details of a new piece to be included in a group art show featuring artists connected to Oklahoma. H2OK: Native Response to the Water Issues in Oklahoma opens at Mainsite Contemporary Art, 122 E. Main St., Norman, on March 10.
The piece, titled Water Serpent, is different for even this contemporary artist, who uses the traditional craft to make statements on the world Indian people face today. She is anxious to show it with the other works.
“Sometimes artwork can be a little egotistical. You’re always talking about yourself and your ideas and there’s not as much opportunity to say, ‘Well I’m interested in art, not just because I want to make art, but because there’s amazing artwork out there,’” Murphy Adams said. “I’m interested in all of it.”
Her interest likely began with her mother, Laurie Tynes of White Fish, Montana. Tynes, part Oglala Lakota, was born on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. After moving to Great Falls, Montana, as a child, she quickly connected with the Cree people living at the nearby Hill 57, an acreage of land where a band of then-landless Cree settled after having obtained squatter’s rights to be there.
After Murphy Adams was born, Tynes began beading with a Cree woman named Ruby StiffArm. StiffArm helped single mothers learn as they waited for their children’s headstart lessons to finish each day.
Adams recalls the “guild mentality” prevalent among those who beaded in that day.
“In any traditional skill – whether it’s singing or drumming or beadwork or ceremonies – sometimes the person who teaches you has the right to put restrictions on how you use that skill because you have a community role when you learn that skill,” Murphy Adams said.
StiffArm forbade anyone she taught to bead images. The teacher felt that she and her own sister had been restricted from creating anything but abstract patterns and floral designs. That belief was reinforced when StiffArm’s sister lost her sight soon after making a buckle with an eagle image.
Tynes did not impart restrictions on her daughter. Around the time that she began beading full dance regalia, Murphy Adams became interested, too. Her first project was beading three straight lines on a keychain fob. It was an exercise in patience and the first of many lessons she would learn.
“You weren’t allowed to have materials until you could prove that you weren’t going to waste them, and you weren’t allowed to make your own stuff until you could prove that you were willing to just do the background work,” she said. “Most people who say they want to learn how to bead … have no idea how much time and patience and sometimes just drudgery that goes into making the pattern, getting the beads, endlessly threading needles and just filling in background.”
“Very little of it is that fun part where you make all the colors come together,” she said. “The rest of it is sewing, doing the edge work, making sure it’s strong and tying off your knots.”
Soon, Murphy Adams began beading images. Later, she earned a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from the University of Montana. It wasn’t until after she finished school that she stepped beyond her known boundaries. Murphy Adams began making beadwork projects that didn’t fit the criteria she had used before. Her work was not made just for powwows, ceremonies or as family heirlooms. Neither was it functional. She also began using untraditional materials.
“And then I really wondered, ‘Does this cross the line and become something that doesn’t relate to my culture anymore?’ Because beadwork has to function. It’s not just a picture to go on the wall. That would be a white way of making art. The Native way is to make something that has function,” she said.
Gradually the work began to make statements about Indian peoples’ lives, such as the triple-extra large T-shirts she beaded to look like warrior shirts reading “Rez Ball Legend” and other praises of Indians’ “natural athleticism” made obsolete by rampant obesity and diabetes rates among tribal people.
They went on exhibit, and she expected outrage, but it never came.
“It was scary to put it out there and say, ‘I’m going to use beadwork to be critical of my own people,’ to use something traditional and positive to say something critical, but I never did get a backlash so I felt a little more free to use it and make artistic messages and not just to make pretty things for people to wear,” she said.
For H2OK, her water serpent will draw on the myth of the creature’s descent into the three levels of the world to reflect the water cycle. She’s already exhibited work based on plant cells – a logical step for a former pre-med major.
“I’m a total nerd, and I like doing this just for its own sake,” she said. “I would bead anything.”
H2OK runs through March 10 in Norman before moving to Bacone College’s McCombs Hall Art Building in Muskogee from April 6-May 13. For more, go to www.ahalenia.com/h2ok.
For more about the Molly Murphy Adams, visit online at www.mollymurphybead.com.



PHOTO BY KAREN SHADE / NATIVE AMERICAN TIMES