Last year I was introduced to the Zimbabwe-based Marigold Beads. The project was established in the early 1990s to provide livelihoods for women in Zimbabwe’s second largest city of Bulawayo who, for various reasons, left formal education at an early age. Today the center operates as a co-operative with Johannesburg-based artist Joni Brenner contributing to a collaborative model of design development with the bead weavers. As necklaces their palettes and patterns are utterly contemporary, while drawing on a rich heritage of bead work historically found across southern Africa. More recently the bead weavers have also embarked on unconventional collaborations such as converting the data of genome research into poetic color fields...