Showcases the vibrant practices of Tlingit women's beadwork
For over 150 years, Tlingit women artists have beaded colorful, intricately beautiful designs on moccasins, dolls, octopus bags, tunics, and other garments. Painful Beauty suggests that at a time when Indigenous cultural practices were actively being repressed, beading supported cultural continuity, demonstrating Tlingit women's resilience, strength, and power. Beadwork served many uses, from the ceremonial to the economic, as women created beaded pieces for community use and to sell to tourists. Like other Tlingit art, beadwork reflects rich artistic visions with deep connections to the environment, clan histories, and Tlingit worldviews. Contemporary Tlingit artists Alison Bremner, Chloe French, Shgen Doo Tan George, Lily Hudson Hope, Tanis S—eiltin, and Larry McNeil foreground the significance of historical beading practices in their diverse, boundary-pushing artworks.
Working with museum collection materials, photographs, archives, and interviews with artists and elders, Megan Smetzer reframes this often overlooked artform as a site of historical negotiations and contemporary inspirations. She shows how beading gave Tlingit women the freedom to innovate aesthetically, assert their clan crests and identities, support tribal sovereignty, and pass on cultural knowledge. Painful Beauty is the first dedicated study of Tlingit beadwork and contributes to the expanding literature addressing women's artistic expressions on the Northwest Coast.

Megan Smetzer earned her PhD in art history at the University of British Columbia in 2007. She teaches in the Art History program in the School of Humanities at Capilano University. This is her first book.

Megan A. Smetzer's profile page

"A superb and compelling study."

American Indian Culture & Research Journal

"Smetzer brings consistent and thoroughly researched attention to the role of women's work, expanding our understanding of Tlingit and Northern Northwest Coast aesthetics . . . This book will be useful and enlightening to many."

American Historical Review

"Past, present, and future are carefully woven together in Megan Smetzer's Painful Beauty, a thoughtful and accessible analysis of Tlingit women's adaptations of beadwork into new forms of cultural production . . . [The book] sheds new light on previously undervalued forms of cultural practice, making a significant contribution to existing scholarship."

Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art

"A comprehensive resource on Tlingit history in the Northwest."

Real Change

"A necessary read for scholars of Native American art, Painful Beauty also includes broader lessons about the limitations of the archive and the work of history. Within Painful Beauty, filling a lacuna caused by the systemic erasure of Tlingit women's beadwork reads as an act of repair."

H-Net Reviews

"Smetzer meticulously documents how bead workers living in painful colonialized situations supported their communities. Smetzer aims to prioritize the idea that multivocal art...effectively challenges the continuing effect of historical trauma through creating beauty that restores balance."

Choice