When Saynday Pulled Us Into This World, Teri Greeves (born 1970)

Teri Greeves uses beadwork to tell rich and intricate stories, from ancient myths to contemporary narratives. “When Saynday Pulled Us Into This World” shows her visual conception of the Kiowa creation myth, when Saynday pulled people out of the underworld through the bark of a cottonwood tree. Greeves connects her practice to the beadwork of all the Kiowa women who came before her, writing, “My stories are from the same source as the voice running through that first Kiowa beadworker’s needles, it is the voice that ran through my grandmother’s hands—it is the voice I first heard, as a young girl, at my mother’s side.”