Hardback

240 Pages

$39.95 USD

Format	Hardback
Published	July 27, 2021
ISBN-13	9780295748948
Language	English
Pages	240
Illustrations	78 color illus., 15 b&w illus., 1 map
Height	10.00 Inches (US)
Width	7.00 Inches (US)
Unit weight	1.9 Pounds (US)
List Prices	$39.95 USD, £33.00 GBP
ONIX	v2.1 Reference

Painful Beauty

Name: Painful Beauty
Price: 39.95 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Megan A. Smetzer, hD
ISBN: 9780295748948

Tlingit Women, Beadwork, and the Art of Resilience

By Megan A. Smetzer, hD

University of Washington Press

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.

About the Author

Megan A. Smetzer is lecturer of art history at Capilano University.

Reviews

"[A] comprehensive resource on Tlingit history in the Northwest."—Real Change

"Smetzer meticulously documents how bead workers living in painful colonialized situations supported their communities. Smetzer aims to prioritize the idea that multivocal art...effectively challenges the continuing effect of historical trauma through creating beauty that restores balance."—Choice

Endorsements

"Succinctly captures the double-edged sword of this subject: the beauty of beadwork by Tlingit women artists as well as the painful histories of settler colonialism in which it is entangled."—Emily L. Moore, author of Proud Raven, Panting Wolf: Carving Alaska's New Deal Totem Parks

"Megan Smetzer advances Northwest Coast scholarship in several ways: it is the first art book I've read which centers Indigenous perspectives ("Tlingit aesthetics," she writes); she deconstructs biases which privilege the pristine formline but overlook the brilliance of the textiles; and she researches and celebrates important Native American women artists who have been previously overlooked in the scholarship."—Ishmael Angaluuk Hope (Tlingit, Inupiaq)

Publisher	University of Washington Press
Series	Native Art of the Pacific Northwest: A Bill Holm Center
BISAC Subject Headings	ART / Native American (40 Titles) HISTORY / Native American (65 Titles) SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / American / Native American Studies (143 Titles)

Format	Hardback
Published	July 27, 2021
ISBN-13	9780295748948
Language	English
Pages	240
Illustrations	78 color illus., 15 b&w illus., 1 map
Height	10.00 Inches (US)
Width	7.00 Inches (US)
Unit weight	1.9 Pounds (US)
List Prices	$39.95 USD, £33.00 GBP
ONIX	v2.1 Reference