Glass Tapestry: Plateau Beaded Bags from the Elaine Horwitch Collection

Glass Tapestry documents the Elaine Horwitch collection of Plateau beaded bags, shown at the Heard Museum in Phoenix in 1993 and organized by Hopi curator Gloria Lomahaftewa. The contoured, fully beaded bags of the Columbia Plateau peoples, with their floral and pictorial faces worked in tiny glass seed beads, are among the most painterly forms of Native beadwork, and the title catches exactly that quality of a woven picture in glass.

Horwitch, the noted Southwestern art dealer with galleries in Santa Fe and Scottsdale, assembled the bags out of genuine love for the craftsmanship, and the catalogue's foreword tells the story of how the collection came together piece by piece. Slim and well illustrated, it is the standard published record of that collection and a useful field for comparing regional bag styles. A clean exhibition catalogue like this one preserves both the objects and the collector's eye that brought them into one room.