PORTLAND, Maine — When Heather Kahn’s mother went to a bead show around 1991, she came home with enough baubles to make a few necklaces, plus a few more to spare. Then she sold them to neighbors out of a paper bag on the sun porch at the family home in Deering Center.
The whole family was shocked when the modest, home-based venture became an immediate success.
“Suddenly, after maybe two months, there were strangers driving up our street, demanding beads,” Kahn said, who now runs the business. “It just got crazy.”
Now, more than 30 years later, Caravan Beads sells millions of dollars worth of glittering, ornate glass beads every year. The bustling trade in Japanese-made, glass, seed-sized beads is done out of an expansive retail shop and mail order warehouse on Forest Avenue.
Artists from all over the world use Kahn family beads in creating exquisite jewelry, sculptures, tapestries and clothing. Some of her beads even adorned costumes in the Lord of the Rings movies.
But now Kahn, with the help of Maine archaeologist Kristina Skillin, is taking her bedazzled family success story one step further.
Under the auspices of a spinoff nonprofit, the pair will open the Museum of Beadwork in August, adjacent to the bead store.
Kahn and Skillin aim to have the museum illuminate the history, culture and beauty of beads and beadwork from around the world. They want the venture to focus on how beadwork connects cultures through history, trade, colonialism and human migration.
The idea has been in the works for a few years.
“We launched our Kickstarter the day Maine’s COVID-19 lockdown started,” Skillin said.
That set them back a bit, but didn’t stop the pair.
For the next few pandemic years, Kahn focused on keeping her business afloat and her employees safe while Skillin made plans for inaugural exhibitions and a created roadmap for the museum’s educational mission.
Skillin said every known culture on the planet has some sort of history of beadwork. The earliest human beads were made of egg shells, then bone, seeds, wood, stone, clay, metal and glass.
“It’s a shared thing that binds all of us,” Skillin said, whose archaeological specialty is human adornment.
Beads, Kahn said, also connect disparate cultures across wide geographies.
“For instance, the tiny [glass] ‘seed’ beads that you see in Native American stuff, those are all European beads,” she said. “Prior to that, they were using natural materials which got replaced — there’s a lot of stuff to talk about. There’s a lot of stories that bind things together which are not necessarily positive, happy stories.”
Kahn and Skillin also hope to have their museum touch on popular beaded women’s fashions from the 1920s. The garments were produced by women working outside the home, for cash, for the first time.
“That’s the age of industrialization,” Kahn said. “You’d see all these big workrooms in Europe where they would have big windows and women would get these jobs sewing and embroidering, and also using beads.”
Cultural connections will be on display when the museum opens with the work of Winthrop artist Nick Heller.
Heller creates small, rich, figurative, beaded tapestries, many with political themes. One shows a European sailing ship headed for the North American shore with sails shaped like a death’s head. Another features former President Donald Trump in less-than-flattering caricature. Still another work deals with abortion.
Heller’s tapestries are inspired by traditional, sequined Haitian Vodou banners usually carried by practicing priests. The banners are often displayed in sanctuaries and at ceremonies.
“About 12 years ago, I was up in Quebec,” Heller said. “I went to an exhibit at the Museum of Civilization and saw them — I’d never seen anything like them before.”
Heller got his beadworking start from Kahn.
“He came to me one day and asked me to show him how to do embroidery with beads,” Kahn said. “And he immediately surpassed me and came back with these tapestries. He’s a genius.”
The Beaded Square Project will be the largest piece at the museum when it opens. The massive installation will be made from 541 6×6-inch beaded squares made by individual artists from 18 countries.
The collaborative community project resembles the famous AIDS Quilt and was inspired by shared experiences of isolation, quarantine, and many other societal changes that occurred during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns.
During that time, beadwork artists in touch over the internet were asked to create and then mail in their squares.
Some are bold, abstract and flat, others are three-dimensional and intricate. More than a few depict fanciful animals and at least one shows a masked face with the word “smile” written on the face covering.
The project was the brainchild of an artist named Nancy Josephson.
“She had a small group of people who, during the pandemic, wanted to make something that could be put together into a bigger thing — so that they could commune on a project together while safely sheltering,” Skillin said.
When the project outgrew itself, Josephson offered it to the museum.
“And it’s phenomenal,” Skillin said. “Some of them are very somber because they’re like, ‘This is my father who died’ or ‘This is in honor of my stepmother who passed away of COVID.’ But some of them are like, ‘This is my garden. This is my happy place.’ Some of them are made of bright colors and say, ‘We need to celebrate right now because we need some happiness in the world.'”
The Museum of Beadwork will open with a fundraising gala on Aug. 4, from 5 to 8 p.m. Tickets can be purchased on the museum’s website.
