Paper Beads on the Move: Mobilizing Trajectories and Subjectivities to Shape Contemporary Art In Uganda

Beads cannot simply be viewed as nonrepresentational, decorative entities. In Uganda, the art of paper bead[ing] is empowering women economically while mobilizing new trajectories that reflect the intersecting and shifting landscapes of public space and private space to shape inquiry into gender relationships, art, art-making, and politics.

Yet paper beads tend to be placed in the broader category of craft, a socially constructed category that views beads as mere decorative objects used for “ornamentation on clothing and household objects” (Labelle 2005: 12), “deemed to be of less value and therefore ignored” (Aronson 1991: 551), and as a result assigned a low aesthetic status. In Uganda, the missionary, artist, and art instructor Margaret Katherine Trowell (1947)¹ similarly held that there was no evidence of representational art, regarding beadwork in East Africa instead as nonrepresentational art. She noted that “pattern-work chiefly of geometric form, [is] found worked out in almost every type of material” (Trowell 1947: 2) and argued that, although the craftspeople behind this art did not work in professional guilds, they were skilled, respected among their communities, and enjoyed privileges because they produced a kind of decorative art that was highly revered by local communities, applied on domestic utensils, and used as personal adornment, including the “masses of beads and metal worn on the neck, arms, and legs, show[ing] a tremendous appreciation of decorative values” (Trowell 1947: 2–3). These views persisted mainly because the power undergirding them was wielded within the epistemic modes of Western intellectual thought (Arowosegbe 2014) that favor a hierarchical classification of arts and crafts.

However, by the late 1960s and 1970s the hierarchies of art and decorative crafts and their links to women’s exclusion from the art scene came under scrutiny. Western scholarship, particularly, started to take an interest in African art and crafts (Kellman 1996), yet at the expense of inquiry into aspects of aesthetic content, use, skill, material, and techniques. The George W. Harley Collection at the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, MA (Reswick 1972), the Culture and Decorative Arts of Africa collection in the Indianapolis Museum of Art (Ross 1976), the African Beadwork: Traditional Symbols exhibition at the Tambaran Gallery, New York (Reif 1991), all signaled the arrival of African beadwork into research, museums, and exhibitions. Although, due to the new scholarly attention to what had been called African folk art, beads began to figure in art exhibitions and research that focused on the beads’ aesthetic and technological quality, this general shift in African art scholarship has not extended to reviewing bead work as a means to change women’s sense of self and allow them to re-figure their identities from within the constructions of public and private spheres. Yet as beads circulate, they combine and recombine through form, material, and processes, while exposing multiple subjectivities that undermine socially predetermined constructions to transform beads into “objects of inquiry with a life of their own”(Kakande and Kasozi 2016).

In this article, I examine the ways in which paper beads and the process of beading, implicated as symbolic conventions of the private, become the very means deployed by women to negotiate private and public spaces while overwriting normative conventions of these spaces to shape creative thinking in research and art. I engaged in ethnographic research in Kireka Banda, Zone B,² a suburb of Kampala, where I found women producing paper beads in their home spaces and selling their beadwork in the city. Using in-depth interviews and field observation, I reexamined paper bead(ing) processes and methods, materials and tools, and the sequence whereby women deployed their paper beads to tap into their artistic and cultural sensibilities to modify beads’ traditional definitions (Sciama and Eicher 1998) while producing meaning that points to the gap between beads as detached entities to beads as research entities. This meaning illuminates notions of spatial mobility, where each paper bead-making stage becomes a means to question the boundaries of private and public spaces, and art-making addresses the links paper beads make in popular culture, media, and art...