Teri Greeves is an accomplished Kiowa beadwork artist. She was born in 1970 and raised on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. When she was a child her mother Jeri Ah-be-hill owned a trading post that specialised in Native American art and textiles. By the age of eight T. Greeves began learning the craft of beadwork from her grandmother, aunt and mother. Drawing on the this long Native American craft tradition T. Greeves has committed to detailing her experience as a 21st-century Kiowa woman through her beadwork. She utilises both traditional and non-traditional materials, both oral histories and contemporary Kiowa realities to craft narratives on buckskin, sneakers, umbrellas, miniature tipis and other everyday objects.

As a young adult she attended the University of California, Santa Cruz where she earned a BA in American Studies in 1995. An early work, Indian Parade Umbrella (1999), won the Best of Show at the Santa Fe Indian Market in New Mexico in 1999. The piece is a reflection on the Indian parades T. Greeves witnessed as a child, which were filled with cultural vibrancy. Each panel on the umbrella tells an individual narrative and witnessing them all together speaks to the entirety of the parade experience. The artist also utilised this panel narrative method in her piece 21st Century Traditional: Beaded Tipi (2010), which depicts a powwow filled with contemporary Native Americans wearing jeans and sunglasses and singing into electric microphones. The piece reflects on the generational responsibility of passing down the “intangibles” of life (spirituality, culture-specific ethos, history, etc.) through dances, ceremonies and community gatherings.

T. Greeves’s best-known pieces are her beaded high-top sneakers and high heels, which subvert dominant expectations of Native American beadwork. In Spider Woman/Emerging Woman (2015), the artist crafts a homage to her recently deceased mother. The artist beads the likeness of two of the most important women in Kiowa culture, Spider Woman and the first human Mother. These two figures, passed down through oral tradition, loom large in Kiowa origin stories and serve as representatives of survival, parenthood and kinship. Spider Woman survived the flood and raised the first Human Mother’s children. Kiowa people are the only ones who can fully appreciate the cosmological significance of these figures. Through this piece, T. Greeves reflects on the importance placed on women in Kiowa culture, the life of her mother, and the significance of motherhood. Through such works, T. Greeves has continued the tradition of Kiowa beadwork and adapted it to tell personal and communal narratives that celebrate cultural wealth and survival.

T. Greeves’s works are part of the permanent collections of the British Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC, among others. Along with numerous solo exhibitions, she has been featured in many well-received group exhibitions, such as the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s Radical Stitch (2023).