SEATTLE.- The Seattle Art Museum opens the exhibit A Bead Quiz. No matter where in the world you go, beads are usually there. They travel vast distances, pulling different parts of the world together like miniature magnets. In this installation, you’ll see how small glass "seed beads," manufactured in the Czech Republic and Venice, Italy, have circled the globe. Kirdi women living in remote hilltops in northern Cameroon use them to decorate skirts that sway with brightly colored compositions. The Bagobo people of the Philippine highlands use the same seed beads to make geometric mazes that protect their bags. Among the Tlingit of Alaska, seed beads are sewn into floral tendrils on what are known as "octopus bags." Locally, an artist has encased a trophy head in these beads to create Sea Bear, her own mythic character. Billions of beads cross boundaries to be put to new uses every year.

Searching through the museum’s permanent collection for beads can feel like a whirlwind tour of distant cultures—there’s a hat for a storyteller from Tibet, a flag for a ceremony in Haiti, garments for a bride in South Africa and for a horse in Japan. Just as beads traverse the world in unpredictable ways, this installation will not be strictly geographic. Instead, you’ll be able to test how far your knowledge of this distinctive medium can take you. There will be beads made out of ostrich egg shells, bamboo, glass, human bone, gourds, metal, coral and plastic. Small beads, the size of a seed, are used to form densely constructed patterns; others, large globes of amber or turquoise, establish bold accents. Bead connoisseurship can be both about the bead itself and about where it has traveled to take hold as an art form.

As a final test for the bead expert, the gallery will feature a collection of bead necklaces by an accomplished world traveler who has sought out hundreds of strands from remote locations. If you can identify each and every bead and where it was strung, your expertise as a world bead connoisseur is assured. Let the test begin.

–Pam McClusky, Curator of Art of Africa and Oceania