Lois Sherr Dubin
My career has followed several divergent yet complementary paths: as a landscape architect, author, exhibition curator and jewelry designer.
A lifelong interest in beads provides the connecting tie.
I was fortunate to study at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture from 1956 to 1961—a seminal time and place in architectural education. An outstanding faculty of architects, landscape architects, and planners taught the importance of creating non-arbitrary designs that gave order to the built physical environment.
Penn’s cross-disciplinary and responsible approach to design (unique for its time) had a deep and lasting effect on me professionally and personally. As a principal in my own landscape architectural firm, a professional corporation of landscape architects experienced in all aspects of site planning and design from 1969 to 2014, we strove to produce work that joined divergent elements into a cohesive and attractive whole. With offices in Manhattan and Santa Monica, we focused on a wide-ranging scale of national and international projects (from intimate gardens through larger scale master plans). We often worked in collaboration with prominent local and national architectural firms to create clear, tight designs where the practical and the beautiful coexisted.
Lois Sherr Dubin
My career has followed several divergent yet complementary paths: as a landscape architect, author, exhibition curator and jewelry designer.
A lifelong interest in beads provides the connecting tie.
I was fortunate to study at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture from 1956 to 1961—a seminal time and place in architectural education. An outstanding faculty of architects, landscape architects, and planners taught the importance of creating non-arbitrary designs that gave order to the built physical environment.
Penn’s cross-disciplinary and responsible approach to design (unique for its time) had a deep and lasting effect on me professionally and personally. As a principal in my own landscape architectural firm, a professional corporation of landscape architects experienced in all aspects of site planning and design from 1969 to 2014, we strove to produce work that joined divergent elements into a cohesive and attractive whole. With offices in Manhattan and Santa Monica, we focused on a wide-ranging scale of national and international projects (from intimate gardens through larger scale master plans). We often worked in collaboration with prominent local and national architectural firms to create clear, tight designs where the practical and the beautiful coexisted.
Recently, I was the landscape architect for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, the memorial designed by Louis I. Kahn on Roosevelt Island in New York City. The park was completed in 2012, forty years after it was originally conceived. I was part of the original design team in 1974. A major component of my work in the latest construction phase (2008 through 2012) was to ensure that Kahn’s original design intent, from the architectural granite wall and paving details to the spacing and selection of trees, remained intact. You can see more photos of this project on the Landscape Architecture page.
Simultaneously, I have a long-standing interest in adornment with a particular emphasis on beads and indigenous cultures. My interest and appreciation for beads started as a young girl and intensified when I visited foreign countries. They were beautiful, accessible and studying them seemed to bring me closer to the cultures with which I came into contact. Whenever possible, I gleaned information about beads from museums, books and traders.
It was not, however, until I visited Kenya in 1982 that it became obvious to me how beads served as much more than adornment. I was deeply moved by observing both the men and women of the Maasai, Turkana and Samburu tribes in their colorful beaded attire and their use of beads to create a visually powerful communication system.
Following the Kenyan trip, I decided to create a comprehensive and visually stimulating book that would synthesize the most important information known about beads from twelve world regions and examine the roles beads play in their cultural contexts. Five years later, The History of Beads: 30,000 B.C. to the Present was published by Harry N. Abrams (New York) in 1987 with four foreign additions, (Britain and translations in French, Italian and German), and multiple re-printings and abridged versions. A revised edition, The History of Beads: 100,000 B.C. to the Present, was reissued in 2009 and is currently being translated into Chinese.
Following the success of The History of Beads, I was asked by the publisher to write another book. Researching and writing the original The History of Beads coincided with considerable time (1983 to 1988) spent in the southwestern United States’ Four Corners region.
Subsequently, North American Indian Jewelry and Adornment: Prehistory to the Present (NAIJA) was published in 1999. NAIJA has also had many reprints in its original 608-page format as well as abridged editions.
It was not, however, until I visited Kenya in 1982 that it became obvious to me how beads served as much more than adornment. I was deeply moved by observing both the men and women of the Maasai, Turkana and Samburu tribes in their colorful beaded attire and their use of beads to create a visually powerful communication system.
Following the Kenyan trip, I decided to create a comprehensive and visually stimulating book that would synthesize the most important information known about beads from twelve world regions and examine the roles beads play in their cultural contexts. Five years later, The History of Beads: 30,000 B.C. to the Present was published by Harry N. Abrams (New York) in 1987 with four foreign additions, (Britain and translations in French, Italian and German), and multiple re-printings and abridged versions. A revised edition, The History of Beads: 100,000 B.C. to the Present, was reissued in 2009 and is currently being translated into Chinese.
Following the success of The History of Beads, I was asked by the publisher to write another book. Researching and writing the original The History of Beads coincided with considerable time (1983 to 1988) spent in the southwestern United States’ Four Corners region.
Subsequently, North American Indian Jewelry and Adornment: Prehistory to the Present (NAIJA) was published in 1999. NAIJA has also had many reprints in its original 608-page format as well as abridged editions.
Documenting the NAIJA information involved eleven years of encounters across the United States and Canada, all of which I personally financed, primarily through my work as a landscape architect. I conducted research at museums, institutions, galleries, private collections, reservations and reserves. Tribal members helped me decipher historic artifacts revealing the depth of lore contained within Native American’s adornment. Contemporary artisans are keenly aware of their responsibility as “guardians of traditions” from which much of their imagery and inspiration derive. In interviews with me throughout the years, they generously and eloquently describe this process, providing insight into a remarkably adaptive heritage.
I was, and remain, deeply moved by the Native North American fundamental worldviews that rests upon humans shared existence with animals, plants, stones, stars and water. All are sentient, interrelated and believed to possess soul or spirit. And I continue to be impressed by the Native North American ability to function within diverse worlds (while maintaining a strong spiritual core).
Indian concepts of connectedness merge neatly with my education in landscape architecture and ecology. I fully appreciate a pragmatic approach to design. I remember, for example, when I asked Yakama beader Delores George why her people from the Columbia River Plateau beaded purple or green horses, she replied: “Because we were at the end of the trade route, and those were the color beads left for us to work with.”
I established The Theodore Dubin Foundation in 1980 to fund education and cultural institutions. The Foundation’s mission was extended in 1988 to help Native people earn a living through their art. To this end, the Foundation (which closed in 2012) sponsored intertribal cultural exchange programs, seminars, lectures, and publications and facilitated the purchase of contemporary Native art that was gifted to museums and institutions. Following my serving as a Commissioner of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, Department of the Interior, Washington, DC, I was a Board member of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution from 2000 through 2018.
I have written books on contemporary Native American master jewelers Jesse Monongya (Navajo-Hopi), Denise Wallace (Chugach Eskimo-Aleut), Lee Yazzie and Raymond Yazzie (Navajo); contemporary master bead workers Joyce and Juanita Growing Thunder (Assiniboine/Sioux ), Rhonda Holy Bear (Cheyenne River Sioux), Jamie Okuma (Luiseño and Shoshone-Bannock) and fiber and bead artist Barbara Natoli Witt. Additionally, I have written for and been published in numerous periodicals.
The Adoption ceremony
Click the image to see more photos of this ceremony.
In August 2006, I was adopted into the family of Jim Hart—a Hereditary Chief of the Haida Nation. Jim is the great-great grandson of Charles Edenshaw and a highly accomplished Northwest Coast sculptor.
The adoption ceremony was held in Old Massett, on the island of Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands). To be acknowledged as a member of Jim Hart’s family and given the Haida name “Big Heart” (English translation) is one of the great honors of my life.