ABOUT
THE PROJECT

BEADS ALL OVER THE WORLD. A Collaborative Exhibition Project (Jan-Dec 2025)

Beads date back to the origins of humankind. Present on all continents, they have served as currency, conveyed social and political messages, and expressed human creativity. Attractive and personal, beads spark the imagination when used in decoration, protective jewellery, and memory artifacts. They are both valuable and moveable: travellers and deep-rooted souvenirs at the same time; they mirror worldwide networks. The ‘BEADS’ project aims to foster diversity, inclusion, and equity by bringing together museums to create a collaborative digital online exhibition of beadworks in all forms of art, craft, and design from all eras and cultures of the world.

‘BEADS’ is a one-object focus project, which makes it unique and valuable, giving it a strong potential to explore and study beads through trade networks, history, and diverse cultures. This project intends to explore the many ways in which beads have been utilised around the world, throughout time. To this end, the project leader (ICOM Costume) and project partners (ICOM Canada, ICOM Singapore, and the African Fashion Research Institute in South Africa, AFRI) are calling worldwide museums to participate in this online digital beadworks exhibition.

This online exhibition was awarded by ICOM SAREC Special Project Call 2024 and co-financed from the ICOM Costume Committee. The selected objects tell bead stories and represent bead art from all continents, offering a large audience a digital display in a virtual online exhibition.
Freely accessible to visitors all around the world, this global digital exhibition features a selection of beadworks from worldwide artists, craftsmen, and designers from different eras.
By focussing on beaded objects, which are rarely displayed in museums while being widely collected for various reasons, this new digital exhibition provides a new perspective on museum collections and also gives artists the chance to present their contemporary works of art. Through this specific and original focus on beads and beadworks, this initiative seeks to benefit the global museum community and to foster collaboration throughout the ICOM museum community and beyond.