Despite the Quake, the Bead Goes On

Imagination is the element in the beaded works of Dan and Eve King-Lehman that makes them art, rather than an extension of an elegant craft popular since King Tut’s time.

The Topanga-based husband-and-wife team makes not jewelry or couture, but humorous statements in bead-covered tapestry, sculpture and other art forms, according to Scott Canty, director of the Los Angeles Satellite Art Program.

Included in a show that begins Tuesday at Artspace Gallery in Woodland Hills is one of the pair’s larger pieces, a nude sculpture whose head rotates on a turntable.

The nude, titled “She’s More Than She Senses,” is a whimsical piece, with a voluptuous pink body and a sedately revolving head that looks like a planet.

The nude and a mirror in her hands are covered with about 250,000 tiny beads, each individually strung and attached.

What makes the beaded sculpture art, according to Canty, curator of this show, is that it could have been adapted to any medium with its statement intact.

And, Canty said, the King-Lehmans’ use of beads places them firmly in a large group of breakaway artists who work with non-traditional materials, people expanding the boundaries of traditional art.

The King-Lehman pieces are full of whimsy, which is what attracted curator Canty to them for this exhibit. “I am calling the show ‘Environmental Delights,’ and I really went wild putting it together,” Canty said.

“We will have Karen Fuson and her mixed media, Sheila Klein’s sculptures and Richard Oginz’s huge kinetic works. It is a lively, often funny grouping of eclectic pieces meant to open people’s minds to the joy of seeing art, and art’s messages, in everything,” he said.

Canty particularly likes the new bead-wrapped neon lights the King-Lehmans have created, “because they have such spectacularly vivid colors, and each evokes a different spirit and mood.”

Stoicism might well be one of those moods, all things considered.

Asked why anyone would choose to give shape to his or her artistic expression in a form that is so painstaking and time-consuming, Dan King-Lehman laughed.

“It’s a great way to learn patience,” he said, adding that it all began as a reflection of an earlier time.

It was the early ‘70s and Lehman had graduated from the California College of Arts and Crafts. He was living in Santa Cruz looking for a personal creative medium, tired of painting in oils and making no money playing coffeehouse guitar.

A friend who worked in fabric suggested that he incorporate beads into his paintings, and he has been stringing them along ever since.

After meeting a fellow College of Arts alumna, Eve King, at a party, the two moved quickly to meld their personal and professional lives, and, finally, their names.

Their works have been purchased by Vincent Price, Steve Wozniak and Leonard Nimoy, and are in the corporate collections of First Interstate Bank and Integrated Data Concepts. They are widely featured in a definitive volume on glass, called “The New Beadwork,” due to be published by Abrams next spring, and have been featured in shows in a number of local museums.

Dan King-Lehman’s huge tapestry self-portrait, titled “I Am Stone,” toured with the University of Oregon Museum of Art’s “The Bead Goes On/Expressions in Contemporary Beadwork” show.

In person, the King-Lehmans are as fey and as funny as their often humorous, eccentric pieces, but their move to Topanga Canyon two years ago was no laughing matter.

They had returned to their home in Santa Cruz, after the famous Loma Prieta earthquake of two years ago, to find not only all their works-in-progress all over the floor, but their materials as well.

Millions of what had been carefully color-separated beads were now lying in a huge rainbow jumble, with the house fallen down around them.

With a small government relocation loan they headed south to stay with relatives until they could find a new home and studio.

The pair took shovels to scoop up the tiny, delicate beads, many of them shipped from Czechoslovakia and Japan, and put them into plastic bags for the trip to Topanga.

Dan King-Lehman now says that from adversity came a new direction.

“Once we opened up the bags of beads, we were fascinated by what we saw,” he says.

The formerly color-coded beads had formed their own amazing combinations.

“We put them back into the trays in the combinations they had arranged themselves into, and we began to create from that,” she said.

Their “four-bangers” are an example of the post-quake work.

Beginning with neon lights, creating a colorful-patterned beaded sleeve for them, surrounding them with mirrors and placing them in series of four, what emerges looks like primal, ethnic, magical wands.

“Environmental Delights” runs Tuesday through Nov. 16 at the Artspace Gallery, 21800 Oxnard St., Woodland Hills. The show, featuring the works of the King-Lehmans, Karen Fuson, Sheila Klein and Richard Oginz , can be seen from noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Free. For information, call (818) 716-2786.