Symbolizing power, enabling ornamentation, and facilitating trade, glass beads are miniature masterpieces that have played significant roles throughout time and across cultures. This major exhibition explores glass beads and beaded objects made by various cultures, representing 3,500 years of human history. Life on a String: 35 Centuries of the Glass Bead will showcase, for the first time, many important works from the large historical glass bead collection of The Corning Museum of Glass as well as objects on loan from seven institutions.
The size of glass beads often belies their importance. They can represent wealth, symbolize gender and family relationships, or indicate social status, all through meaning signified in their color and patterning. Economic and political relationships around the globe—especially during the period of European colonization—are embodied in the beads manufactured in Europe and distributed in Africa and North America. Their styles influenced indigenous bead production, and ultimately, beads made in formerly colonized lands followed a reverse course back to Europe.
Traded globally for centuries, glass beads are among the earliest attempts at glass production and have been found at ancient glass manufacturing sites in the eastern Mediterranean from the second millennium B.C. The beads in the exhibition demonstrate the variations in manufacturing techniques used to create beads and beaded objects through time. A loom for beading and molds used to make powdered glass bodom beads will be on display along with images of beads being produced around the world, to illuminate the vast and rich history of techniques for bead production.
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