What Goes Around

It started with an obsession.

“Anybody who beads is obsessed. It’s a very focused, meditative activity,” said Sherry Leedy, a painter, gallery director and beader whose hobby has resulted in a traveling exhibition showcasing artists whose first choice of media are tiny, shimmering orbs of eye candy.

“Pure Vision: American Bead Artists,” through Aug. 25 at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, was curated by Leedy and B.J. Shigaki, director of Minnesota’s Rochester Arts Center and is being taken across the nation by the independent, nonprofit ExhibitsUSA.

Fragile lavender florets, brash pearly globes--imagine most any color, shape or patina, and it’s in the exhibition of 65 pieces, most made since 1995 by 28 mid-career artists.

“Water Wave,” a necklace of hand-made polymer clay beads by Oakland’s Pier Voulkos (daughter of famed ceramist Peter Voulkos), seems to undulate. “Ivory Tower,” a vase crusted with myriad glass beads by Seattle’s David Chatt, appears to marry totemism with zoology.

Functionality is well-represented in the show, Leedy said in a recent interview from the gallery in Kansas City, Mo., that bears her name.

“It’s a legitimate end in itself,” she said of beadwork. “I make bracelets, and wearing them is not about a profound, philosophical thing, but it’s a wonderful, visual and tactile experience.”

Many of the works here, however, do pack an ideological punch. These sculptures and wall hangings move “art made of beads from the neglected margins of American craft to the forefront of contemporary art,” writes Seattle art critic Matthew Kangas in the show’s color catalog.

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One such punch was more than art center supervisor Toni McDonald-Pang deemed appropriate for the venue. She removed two pieces by Chicago’s Mary Ann Hickey that included photographs of young girls surrounded by male genitals.

Three years ago, McDonald-Pang removed from a center-organized show a ceramic vessel with male genitalia. This time, she was acting within ExhibitsUSA guidelines and said she didn’t want children as young as the 6-year-olds who attend the center’s summer Arts Camp to see the works, particularly the one picturing a girl dressed for her first Holy Communion.

“I sympathize with the point of view” of unrestricted artistic freedom, she said. “But these children are a captive audience . . . and we have some responsibility to the parents and the children.”

Hickey, interviewed from Chicago, said she understands the decision, which she doesn’t plan to protest. But she called it childish and unintelligent, noting that the works have been shown at Chicago’s Loyola University, a Roman Catholic institution.

The phallic symbols, she said, allude to hierarchical and patriarchal institutions such as the Catholic Church “and the way that they dictate blind obedience to authority.”

“If we create a climate of blind obedience among children, it causes abuse, sexual or otherwise, to take place,” Hickey said.

Why, she asked, are male genitalia worse than a woman’s behind, as in her “Fallen Angel,” one of two of her works that remains in the show, which includes other provocative works expressing heated social and highly personal concerns.

Joyce Scott, a well-known Baltimore-based artist, addresses racism against African Americans with “Untitled,” a sculptural glass piece etched with handguns; an apple-sized bead at its base bears the words “shot dead.”

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Lindsay Obermeyer of Chicago combines an X-ray with translucent beads in “Sacred Heart,” a response to the 1992 surgery she had to remove a thyroid-gland tumor doctors believed to be cancerous.

“The event ignited an exploration into what has happened to my body and the manner in which my body is viewed by society,” Obermeyer writes in a gallery guide. “This systematic destruction of disease ultimately reduces the patient to a bystander, a mere campaign number in the war to restore peace within the body.”

Such works are hardly body adornment. They represent a general broadening of works in beads that can qualify as contemporary art, a movement that has been gathering momentum over the past 30 years, Leedy said.

“With this kind of a show, people are always asking, ‘How did they make that? Where can I buy those beads?’ ” Leedy said. “You can learn all the [beading] skills you want, but if you don’t have the ideas, it becomes empty. I think all of these objects are really full.”

* “Pure Vision: American Bead Artists” is at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, 14321 Yale Ave. Through Aug. 25. Photographs by Diane Edwards and Barbara Spitz and “Bigger than Life,” huge sculpted bead “jewelry” by Don Fitzgerald, also are on view. Hours: 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday, 1-5 p.m. Sunday. Free. (949) 724-6880.