Beaded Prayers.

National Center of Afro-American Artists Boston October 28, 2005-February 2006

Memory, spiritual creativity, unity, and diversity were issues conveyed by Sonya Clark in her "Beaded Prayers" exhibition at the National Center of Afro-American Artists (NCAAA) in Boston. Located in a majestic nineteenth century mansion in Roxbury, Boston's African American neighborhood, the National Center of Afro-American Artists is a private, nonprofit art space founded in 1968 with the mission to reach out to the local community and celebrate the artistic and cultural heritage of people of African descent. It is fitting that this museum was one of the many venues of "Beaded Prayers," a community-based project inspired by African amulets that embraces the individual creativity of its diverse group of participants worldwide.

"Beaded Prayers" was created and conceived by Sonya Clark, chair of the Department of Craft/Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth School of the Arts and formerly the Baldwin-Bascom Professor of Creative Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Clark started the project in 1999 with the support of the Edna Wiechers Arts in Wisconsin Award, a grant designed to provide the means for artists to touch communities that are not often provided artistic opportunities. Clark's "Beaded Prayers" exhibition is constantly evolving and changing, and the installation on display at the NCAAA included its latest accumulation of strikingly colorful beaded cloth packets. Individual participants from thirty-five countries, including the United States, Brazil, Ghana, India, and Australia, made the packets, filling them with small pieces of paper where they wrote their personal wishes, hopes, dreams, or prayers. The installation was striking, with more than 4500 palm-sized sealed cloth packets decorated with beads displayed on more than 120 panels 2' (.6m) square. The panels were grouped in various configurations throughout the exhibition space, resembling a vividly colored patchwork quilt.

The exhibition itself, however, was only one component of the entire experience. At the opening, Clark gave an animated discussion of the project. The following day she led a hands on Beaded Prayers Workshop that gave participants the opportunity to create two beaded packets or prayers, one to keep in celebration of individual creativity and the other to contribute to Clark's ever-growing exhibition. The name "beaded prayers" was due to Sonya Clark's realization that the words "bead" and "prayer" derive from the old English word bede. Hence participants fill their packets with written messages and at least one bead must be sewn on them. Clark has led hundreds of workshops, but the project is not reliant on Clark herself for its sustenance. Clark's highly informative website (www.beadedprayersproject.com) explains the process of creating a beaded prayer and encourages the public to lead Beaded Prayers Workshops in their own communities.

Although Clark explained that the project did not belong to her but to all of its contributors, Clark's engaging personality and her dynamic presentation of its history and current content certainly adds to the viewer's experience. Clark, a fiber artist, has a history of making interactive, community-based art projects inspired by her African heritage (Clark 1998). Clark, whose parents are from Jamaica and Trinidad, often saw Pitchy Patchy performed as a child and later made the connection between Pitchy Patchy and the Yoruba Egungun masquerade, appreciating how cloth bound and tied people to each other and to their ancestors. Clark, who is also of Scottish heritage, found that people in the Highlands of Scotland visited sacred healing wells, called clootie wells, where they washed their bodies with cloth and then hung the cloth in a nearby tree. The most powerful wells could be identified by the fact that they had the most cloth. Her third source of inspiration for creating a collaborative art project was the AIDS memorial quilt, where people used cloth to preserve the memories of those who passed away. In all of these examples, the accumulation of cloth is mnemonic, spiritual, and curative, and like the warp and weft of cloth, weaves people together.

In her workshop, Clark explained that in many cultures small containers filled with written text are meant to be protective. For example, Asante hunters wear cloth and leather amulets tilled with herbal medicines and written text from diverse sources, including the Qur'an and the Bible. A Jewish mezuzah, a small rectangular box containing passages from the Torah, is fixed on a doorpost as a protective symbol of moral values and faith. Many cultures used beads to focus prayers, and Clark used the examples of the Catholic rosary, Buddhist prayer beads, and Islamic beads used to recite the ninety-nine names of Allah. Clark mentioned that the Yoruba liken children to beads, demonstrating their preciousness, and discussed how Native American women created beaded amulets in the shape of turtles and lizards to hold the umbilical cords of their children.

Clark then instructed participants on how to make several basic styles of beaded packets, ranging from simple "taffy style" pieces of cloth tied at both ends with colored thread to square packets sewn with a beaded double edge. However, upon close examination of the installation, it was obvious that most participants embraced Clark's anthem of unity within diversity. The packets included a multitude of styles, colors, shapes, textures, and materials, and it was difficult not to be touched by the poetic and creative process behind them. For example, the paper prayer placed inside a clay amulet included in the exhibition must have turned to dust during the firing process. One packet took the form of a cloth bracelet carefully covered with beads and another included the photograph of a woman humorously blowing kisses embroidered out of bright red beads. One participant covered a hand-shaped piece of cloth with beads, a familiar design in North Africa that protects against the evil eye. A blue fabric packet had a beautifully embroidered beaded sun on its surface, which Clark explained was made by a woman as a symbol of hope to honor her teenage son who recently ended his heroin addition.

I have attended several Beaded Prayers Workshops, and I am always struck by the meaningful ways her project heals and empowers people. Barry Gaither, the director of NCAAA, saved a rose from a bush his mother planted in front of their home shortly before she died. He brought dried petals from this white rose to the workshop and lovingly sewed them, along with his written prayer, into a bright yellow square of cloth, expertly beading its outside edges. One man in his forties with cancer was anxious to return to his support group and share the project with them. All of these participants, however, were instructed by Clark to keep their written prayers secret, since secrecy increases their efficacy. Several participants bent over their papers while writing to carefully guard their wishes from others. Another did not write her prayer on paper, rather she whispered it into her packet. Often Clark has found herself explaining the importance of writing unselfish prayers to children. She shared the story of how, after one young boy in an economically disadvantaged community asked her how to spell the word "million," she launched into a sermon about how money is not necessarily a good thing and can destroy happiness. The boy responded by asking his friend, "How did she know I was going to ask for a million dollars?"

The "Beaded Prayers" exhibition is about people, and Clark especially wants to touch individuals and communities that need healing. Clark shared the story of Alison Perkins, the Deputy Curator of Education at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Perkins contacted Clark about bringing "Beaded Prayers" to their museum in 2003. Perkins attended a Beaded Prayers Workshop earlier that year, and the prayer she enclosed inside her beaded cloth packet came true: Perkins became pregnant with her second child. Perkins, like many of the workshop's participants, wanted to give back to the project by sharing it with others, enabling the exhibition to grow and expand. Clark explained that every time a new beaded prayer gets added, the project changes and its power increases.

While Clark cited the ubiquitous connection between beads and prayers, the spiritual and aesthetic influence of African art on her project was the most profound. As Henry Drewal (1998) illustrated in his research on Yoruba beadwork, the serial act of beading can be viewed as a metaphor for human relationships, binding people together one by one or bead by bead. When threaded together, beads connote continuity over time and a connection to the spiritual realm. "Beaded Prayers" also conveyed the power of accumulation, containment, and secrecy, concepts crucial to the efficacy of African art as discussed by Mary Nooter Roberts in her book Secrecy: African Art that Conceals and Reveals (1993). The wrapped medicinal packets on Kongo nkisi, for example, express the idea of contained supernatural forces and convey the feeling of ngitukulu, astonishment, to the viewer, suggesting the presence of something extraordinary (Harris and MacGaffey 1993). Photographs of the "Beaded Prayers" exhibition do not accurately convey the sense of astonishment and energy one feels when surrounded by the accumulation of thoughts, prayers, and dreams kept secret inside 4500 sealed beaded packets. Each person beaded his or her own cultural background, life history, aesthetic sensibility, dreams, and ambitions, and the power of so many pairs of hands is amazing. It takes two hands to clap and the power and energy behind 4500 pairs of clapping hands creates a thunderous roar of applause.

Sonya Clark feels that "Beads Prayers" is a gift that keeps giving, and as long as people want it, it is her responsibility to continue it into the future. The "Beaded Prayers" exhibition next will be at the Elijah Pierce Gallery of the King Arts Complex in Columbus, Ohio, from June 15 to August 19, 2006.

References cited

Clark, Sonya. 1998. "Sonya Clark in Her Own Words." In Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity, ed. Doran H. Ross, pp. 184-5. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

Drewal, Henry John. 1998. "Yoruba Beadwork in Africa." In Beads Body and Soul: Art and Light in the Yoruba Universe, ed. Henry John Drewal and John Mason, pp. 13-86. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

Harris, Michael, and Wyatt MacGaffey. 1993. Astonishment and Power: Kongo Minkisi and the Art of Renee Stout. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Roberts, Mary Nooter. 1993. Secrecy: African Art that Reveals and Concels. New York: Museum for African Art.