The Ndebele people of South Africa are renowned for their graphic style of both abstract and representational imagery, which they used in both murals and beadwork.

Beaded ensembles, each reflecting the maker's creative powers, were worn on all ceremonial occasions. Beadwork had spiritual power, and was therefore also applied to fertility dolls, scepters, and dance wands, all of which forged a connection to the spirit world.

The beadwork in this exhibition reveals both thematic continuity and stylistic evolution. It includes works dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, characterized by mostly white beads, through to pieces in "1960s style," in which black, mauve, navy, and green beads predominate.

From the 1920s onward, Ndebele beadwork reflected a fascination with the Western world as an "other." Designs depicted alphabetic letters, airplanes, electric lights, and urban architectureÑall signs of modernity.

The front gallery includes rectangular aprons (iziphephetu) worn by unmarried women; fringed aprons (mapoto) worn at marriage, and five-fingered aprons (ijogolo) worn by women with children. Also in this room are a married woman's leather cape (linaga) with a lengthy train. Trains (nyoga, meaning snake) trailed from the head or back of the neck. The semicircular leather backskirt was worn by an Ndebele man.

The rear gallery includes traditional Ndebele blankets, whose vertical stripes contrast with horizontal beaded panels, and several beaded staffs that channeled spiritual power. Wands in the form of telephone poles, or pylons called telefoni, evoke electricity as a metaphor for spiritual power.

The dolls include a figure of a seated male diviner, a bottle used a fertility doll or to store fertility medicine, and three fertility figures that represent ideal women of marriageable age, wearing beaded body rings (golwane) like those displayed nearby. Neck rings are also visible on some staffs for women and on.