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...