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

Abstract

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 refigure 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. Furthermore, I trace these new connections in artworks by Gateja Sanaa that implicate paper beads in broader debates on gender, power, identity, and Ugandan politics to expand the margins of beads as craft, contemporary art, and research. This article deploys a multidisciplinary theoretical framework borrowing lenses from critical theory (Kopytoff 1986) and feminist and social theories of art (Gell 1998) to draw linkages that reposition beads as art and research through close reading, content analysis, and cross referencing.Information on the history of paper beads is rather scanty. European accounts of the early twentieth century (Logan 2001, Lome 2016) suggest that paper beads were made from wallpaper offcuts that women rolled to make jewelry and curtain blinds. Classified among needlework parlor crafts, beadwork was encouraged to present an image of appropriately feminine behavior (Lome 2016). Women produced beads as a pastime, firmly fixed in the private sphere (Logan 2001), where the finished beaded products were a demonstration of talent to be displayed and used in the home. By 1917 the Modern Priscilla,3 a women's magazine, had started to print tutorials on making paper beads.Available evidence suggests that Sanaa Gateja introduced paper beads to Uganda in 1990. Gateja is a contemporary Ugandan artist born in 1950 in Kisoro, western Uganda. His life is a journey itself, marked by travels across Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Japan, Italy, and London. These travels, he says, exposed him to diverse cultures, presenting learning opportunities that strengthened his resolve to explore African experiences and materials.Gateja's paper bead(ing) journey, however, did not start in Uganda, although he worked professionally as an Assistant Crafts Officer at the Ministry of Culture and Community development in the 1970s. He first encountered beads in Mombasa, Kenya, where he operated Sanaa Gallery and worked as an artist and jeweler. In 1982, he moved to Italy, where he trained in interior design at the Internazionale dell'Arte in Florence, and in 1983 he relocated to London and joined the John Cass College of Art (now the London College of Art and Design), where he received a City and Guilds diploma in gold- and silver-smithing in 1985. In London he also pursued an apprenticeship with an eminent Japanese jeweler, Tomazo Yashimoto.While in London, Gateja4 acquired a large quantity of paper products that he kept at his apartment, including paper board cores from tissue paper, newsprint, magazine adverts, invitation brochures, and cards. He experimented with them and recycled them into materials for producing different forms of art: jewelry, tapestries and wall decorations, and wearable art.5 He experimented with collages, as well as assorted paper forms and shapes. He cut and refashioned the paperboard cores into interesting triangular shapes, which he discussed with his instructor at the London College of Art and Design. It was during one of these discussions that his instructor introduced Gateja to paper beads, which she said were made in a manner similar to the Egyptian technology of hammering and rolling iron to make tubes.6 Gateja took the beads back to his apartment and assessed them for similarities and differences with the forms he had built from the paperboard cores. He also researched the origins of paper beads and in the process learned that the beads emerged as a home craft during the Victorian era (1837–1901) and experienced a renaissance during World War II due to scarcity of materials. As Gateja explains, “I learnt that when people do not have anything, they will use anything around them to make adornments, which is very much like an African situation.”7Against this backdrop, when Gateja returned to Uganda in 1989, he popularized paper beads as prime materials for his art-making by taking them through experimental recycling processes. He currently operates an art studio, Kwetu Afrika Women's Association, in Lubowa, Kampala, and works with women who produce paper beads (Figs. 1–2) that he buys back in bulk. Through this paper bead-making project, Gateja has created opportunities for economic empowerment for many women, like Aidah Mukisa.8The context of mobility discussed here considers the ways in which women's paper bead(ing) practices mobilize new meaning. Where African art scholarship has tended to ignore women's creative sensibilities (Labelle 2005), in this section I examine women's paper bead(ing) processes, methods, materials, and spaces, focusing on the sequence through which women deploy their paper beads as a means of power and influence to negotiate and refigure public space, which is gendered as male, and private space, gendered as female, to demand new representation within the constructs that define women and beadwork. By virtue of its rootedness in the narrative of the everyday, women's beadwork taps into and opens up academic inquiry about daily living and surrounding objects (Kellman 1996: 37). Paper bead(ing) becomes critical in generating a way for women as creative actors and producers to elaborate and extend knowledge in which multiple narratives about the private and public can coexist to inform scholarly understandings of cultural dynamics. This knowledge exposes the multiple subjectivities of paper beads. In this context, paper beads are powerfully reconstructed as a means to comment on and critique practices that women might agree or disagree with, giving them the opportunity to propose their own alternatives. It is within this context that paper beads illuminate notions of mobility to make new connections that shape scholarly debates on art, research, and gendered spaces.Women's mobility in Uganda has been very complicated since the advent of the colonial period in 1900, which brought with it what was known as the “hut tax” regime. This tax obligation increased the tax burden on polygamous families, especially those that owned several homes. Many men, as heads of households, returned to monogamy to reduce their tax burden. While some women found themselves without “husbands” as a result (Tumusiime 2017: 58–68), others moved into the city—ekibuga Kampala.9 Kampala is the capital city of Uganda, which emerged out of negotiations over power, and by acquired different that created new ways of the an space of power, a by and the the from a also means to and mobility of and power the multiple and of to of By Kampala had become a the of the many women who took of their mobility and to the city to in this public period up to the is also very in the history of Ugandan It was marked by the of and during which many in and Many women were to become creative in their economic with had or been moved into the In 1989, in an to an economic as a result of Uganda introduced and through the and the World These opportunities that several cultural and including in Paper to in of and African in among These under to women's paper beads on the and paper beads into research about women in and Beads a means to an It to women as the and heads of households, understandings of public and private space has been as a for and In women who work in the home domestic as and producing for their are and the of paper bead(ing) by women in this space a change in of gender and a critique of gendered spatial expand the of normative conventions about the home. 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