Glacier Park Bears Photo by Dianna Troyer
COMPLIMENTARY! TAKE ONE! FREE! Jackie Bread Creates Contemporary Art through A Traditional Form
Jackie Bread wraps up in a wool blanket with the beaded border that the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian bought from her this summer. The four portraits include two of her ancestors, Yellow Kidney and Little Dog. The other two are Curley and Thunder. [Photo by Bernice Karnop]
By Bernice Karnop In August, Great Falls artist, Jackie Bread, showed an indigo wool blanket with large beaded border at the Santa Fe Indian Market. The border carries four highly rendered portraits of historic Blackfeet men, tipi decorations, the night sky, the daytime sky, the morning star, and other designs. Each one is stitched dramatically in pixels of tiny colored beads. It is embellished with ribbons, ermine, and shiny cloth silhouettes of the same hue. Out of all the fine art at this popular market, the blanket caught the eye of the director of the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. He purchased it for its collection. “That was a really nice surprise,” says Jackie, who has other beadwork at the Smithsonian as well. “It made me feel like what I am doing is valid and respected. You really can’t ask for more than that.” Her work is indeed valued and respected. She has won close to 90 awards since she started showing in 1995. Her beaded art can be seen in The Museum of the Rockies, the C.M. Russell Museum, and the Montana Historical Society. It has been in displays at such places as the Museum of Art and Design in New York, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Holter Museum of Art, and Tulsa’s Philbrook Museum. Jackie has been making photo realistic portraits in beads for more than 30 years. This is an unusual subject for beading, and the faces are striking with light and shade from both translucent and transparent colored beads. She uses a traditional technique called the appliqué stitch, where one needle and thread carries the beads, and the other needle and thread sews them down. It is very durable. The technique is traditional, but the work is very contemporary, according to Jackie. The themes are almost exclusively Blackfeet because that is what she grew up with on a ranch outside of Browning. “That’s what I know,” she explains. Although her grandmother died before she was born, the beadwork she left mesmerized Jackie. She examined the stitches and the colors to figure out how and why her grandmother chose what she did. In this way, Jackie taught herself the art of beading. After she graduated from Browning High School, Jackie planned to attend Montana State in Bozeman. But in April that year, she learned about a school in Santa Fe, New Mexico, called the Institute of American Indian Art. It is the only Native American art school, and it is internationally renowned. “It changed my world,” says Jackie. She had thought beadwork was a craft that you used to make things for family or to make small items that you could sell. In Santa Fe, she discovered that beading requires every skill that a fine artist uses, from being able to compose a drawing, to using positive and negative space, highlights, and shadow. She discovered that you do not just have to create designs with beads; you can be individual and very creative. She likes to say that her pieces each have (Cont’d on pg 29)