Pair of Lakota Beaded Hide Saddle Bags

This visually stunning pair of saddle bags, used to store clothing and other personal possessions, demonstrate a highly evolved concept of design that makes as powerful an impact on the viewer today as it would have on a distant plain in the 19th century. It was likely created by a Lakota Sioux woman, who would find inspiration for beaded designs in the ordinary events of her life. Women were responsible for skinning and gutting animals killed in a hunt, but in recreating her firsthand encounter with the internal physiology of the animal, this artist would have had to use a variety of complex geometric arrangements. This is because Sioux women were traditionally forbidden from working in the realm of pictographs -- which were reserved for men --  and so developed a complex visual language based on abstraction.