Detail of Bianca Velasquez’s beaded interpretation of the Strepsiptera.

On a river trip, Bianca Velasquez used the solitary quiet of the desert float as a meditation on her current show’s topic. The water bugs caught her attention and a fellow mate on the trip—unbeknownst to her at the time, a wildlife biologist specializing in bears, well-versed in fauna and insects across the spectrum—told her about their different mating patterns and quirks of the many bugs’ often brief existences on this planet. The power dynamics of the insects, Velasquez realized, were radical. The feminine power actualized in the primal nature of these queens of the pest world reminds us the patriarchy is a human construct. Or how parasitic relationships make food and home of the weak. Velasquez made these scientific phenomena humanly relevant.

In Survival Instincts, on view through June 22, six of Velasquez’s hand beaded pieces occupy the front gallery at Bountiful Davis Art Center. The Salt Lake City artist’s beading practice started six years ago when she ripped a canvas and used an old beading kit from her tween years to patch the hole. It has evolved in the current show into a refined practice of painting with gradated micro beads and gems and colored pearls, swirling and shaping the bugs and their primal dances like brushstrokes on a canvas, or a pixelated photo that comes into focus when stepping back.

Bianca Velasquez, “And this is ‘Wonderweb,” 2026, 16×24 in.

In her artist statement, Velasquez notes: “These bugs and insects’ visceral processes of reproduction and evolution hit hard against human stories of love, power and control.” Her witty placards, jokes, and ironic questions relate these bugs’ existences to our own lives, we fellow fleeting beings on this planet. The horror or irony or creepy crawly nature is quelled by her feisty, gorgeous and clever presentations of the bugs.

The beadwork is stylized, almost graphically, taking the bugs out of their habitats and placing them in chromatically complementary displays that highlight the raw and at times microscopic beauty. Starting from sketches, Velasquez bead maps the composition. There is a contemporary play on traditional Native American bead working, using colors and the practice in and of itself to showcase traditional underappreciated craft often by women that bring an ode to the earth and her offerings, while recontextualizing the medium as figurative compositions. The beadwork makes us look closer, to learn what these bugs have to teach us.

A male black widow is half the size of a female. In courting a female, he will arrive at her web and pluck a vibratory song and dance on the silk. Making his way to second base he taps her body, and conception proceeds. Often, females will eat their males after conception, hence their name. “Guess it depends on the song he plays,” Velasquez wits.

On the contrary, Strepsiptera are insect parasites in which the winged and agile male injects the female’s body with larvae that go on to eat her from the inside out. Taking her artistic license, Velasquez gives her female Strepsiptera wings and the power to abort such a heinous mission.

Tarantula hawks are a wasp that injects its namesake arachnid with its progeny, killing the tarantula, making it home and food for the babies. The artist asks, “Can we think of others who advance themselves off of the backs of the defenseless?”

Velasquez captures the evolutionary spontaneity of these fleeting beauties with contours and iridescence and texture hard to capture in other mediums. The beads brought a tedium back to these fleeting beings we often never give the time of day under our annoyance or horror. The beadwork will make us reconsider what we think of scary or gross or annoying. These bugs were made gorgeous and glamorous, and their evolutionary prowess made wisdom for us to learn from.

This collection would make an amazing companion show to the Bug World Exhibit at the Natural History Museum — both endow grace and iridescent enchantment to insects while showcasing their intriguing, heavy-metal nature, and a sequential afternoon of insect mania would reward the curious.

Velasquez’s thoughtful subject matter, refined display, and evident adoration for these bugs remind us how beautiful creation can be, even at the small, fleeting scale of insects — creatures worth fighting for, whose evolutionary prowess is remarkable and to be cherished. It is art like hers that brings these minutiae to the surface, their intricate beauty rescued from screeches and annoyed swats. Velasquez is on a tear, with several more beadwork shows on the docket.

Survival Instincts, Bountiful Davis Art Center, Bountiful, through June 22.

Genevieve Vahl

Genevieve Vahl is a writer, farmer and artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her writing focuses on how art and community intersect, how to bring access to food and covering climate solutions around the Salt Lake Valley. She also writes poetry, binds artist books, makes paper and runs cyanotype prints from film.