Theresa Honeywell, an American artist best known for her unconventional integration of craft materials into masculine-coded objects, has gained widespread attention and critical acclaim for her bold public art initiative Beads on Bikes. This project, a continuation of her longstanding interrogation of gender, labor, and aesthetic hierarchies, involves the meticulous embellishment of bicycles with elaborate beadwork, transforming utilitarian machines of motion into dazzling mobile sculptures. These beaded bikes are not only objects of visual spectacle, but also active interventions in public space—challenging traditional boundaries between fine art and street culture, while inviting passersby to engage with the unexpected union of decoration and function.
Honeywell first came to prominence with her yarn-covered Harley Davidson motorcycles and power tools, which juxtaposed industrial strength with textile softness in order to subvert cultural assumptions about femininity and craft. With Beads on Bikes, she takes this dialogue further by incorporating glass beads—labor-intensive and historically coded as decorative and feminine—into street-ready bicycles. The project originated in Portland, Oregon, a city known for its cycling culture and experimental public art scene. There, Honeywell began customizing a series of salvaged bikes, coating their frames, spokes, seats, and accessories with thousands of glass seed beads, sequins, rhinestones, and metal charms. The result was a fleet of rolling art pieces that glittered under sunlight and streetlamps alike, injecting vibrancy and visual poetry into otherwise utilitarian city landscapes.
Each beaded bike is treated as a site-specific artwork, created in response to the local environment or historical narratives of the neighborhood where it will be deployed. For example, Velvet Velocity, one of her most iconic pieces, was covered in a rich palette of ruby, amethyst, and gold beads stitched in a swirling art nouveau pattern that mimicked the stained-glass windows of an old downtown cathedral. The handlebars were wrapped in purple suede ribbon, accented with tassels made of beaded chain fringe. A custom seat embroidered with a golden honeybee referenced both her surname and her philosophy of industrious beauty. Parked outside the cathedral during a local art walk, Velvet Velocity became an instant magnet for onlookers, triggering conversations about religious iconography, urban mobility, and the place of handmade labor in contemporary society.
Honeywell’s technical process is a marvel of patience and precision. She uses a combination of peyote stitch and brick stitch beadwork to create flexible sheaths that she then wraps around the metal tubing of each bike. For flat surfaces like baskets and fenders, she often embroiders directly onto reinforced fabric that is then mounted onto the frame. Her choice of beads includes Czech glass, vintage seed beads, metallic bugle beads, and even repurposed jewelry components collected from secondhand stores and flea markets. Every color palette is considered not only for its visual impact but for its symbolic associations—neon colors for speed and urban grit, earth tones for natural cycles, monochromes for meditations on form.
A standout example of her conceptually-driven work is Gearshift Totem, a towering cargo bike she outfitted with beaded panels in Native American-inspired geometric patterns—each panel representing a different gear or speed. For Honeywell, the project was an exploration of control and transition, using the bike’s gear system as a metaphor for personal change and adaptability. The beads used in this piece were matte-finished and arranged in motifs resembling arrowheads and step pyramids, evoking both movement and heritage. The piece toured nationally with a traveling exhibition on feminist craft, parked at various universities and public plazas, where it drew attention not only for its craftsmanship but for its layered commentary on movement, identity, and resilience.
Though her work is undeniably beautiful and technically impressive, Honeywell’s Beads on Bikes also serves as a critique of gendered labor divisions. By covering a mode of transportation—typically associated with ruggedness, autonomy, and efficiency—in the labor-intensive, detail-obsessed medium of beadwork, she collapses the binary between masculine and feminine, useful and ornamental. Her beaded bikes are not “practical” in a traditional sense, but they function nonetheless: they can be ridden, parked, locked, and displayed. In doing so, they insist on the validity of art in everyday life, of craftsmanship in public view, and of beauty as a form of radical interruption.
Importantly, Honeywell does not treat her beaded bikes as precious museum artifacts. Many are placed in the public domain without signage or explanation, left to be discovered organically by pedestrians, cyclists, and curious children. This element of surprise is integral to her ethos. She wants people to encounter art where they least expect it, to blur the line between art and life, and to democratize beauty by placing it on wheels. Some of her installations have been mobile parades; others have been left anonymously at bike racks, only for their creatorship to be traced back through viral social media posts and community buzz.
Her ongoing collaboration with urban planners and cycling advocacy groups further elevates the project beyond aesthetic statement. In cities like Austin, Minneapolis, and Vancouver, Honeywell has worked with local artists to conduct beadwork workshops, inviting community members to co-create components of new beaded bike sculptures. These workshops serve as both educational and social interventions, highlighting the value of craft while reinforcing the importance of public art as a participatory, collective process.
The Beads on Bikes series has earned Honeywell a place in the evolving conversation around art’s role in shared space. It exemplifies her belief that public art need not be monumental or immovable to have impact; it can be intimate, kinetic, and interactive. In a world often overwhelmed by digital visuals and impermanent trends, her beaded bikes offer a slow, shimmering alternative—a testament to the enduring power of handwork, playfulness, and radical embellishment.
Theresa Honeywell’s bead-encrusted bicycles don’t just roll through city streets—they glide through our expectations of what art can be, refracting sunlight, culture, and tradition through every tiny glass bead. Her work invites us to move differently, to look longer, and to find art not just in galleries, but in the gears and spokes of everyday life.