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Baskets at The Bascom
Written By: Lin Sheffield - The Bascom | Issue: 2018/12 - December
Interweaving Southern Baskets is on view in the Loft Gallery at The Bascom from now until December 30. This beautiful exhibit, curated by Laura Wingfield, incorporates over 70 baskets from private collections to showcase Native American, Appalachian, Gullah, and Contemporary baskets.
The South has always been home to a blend of cultures – from Native Americans here 14,000 years ago to Europeans 500 years ago, followed by Africans forced to migrate. By 1500, cultures in the South included Creek, Cherokee, Catawba, Choctaw, Chitimacha, and Coushatta. From Europe were English, Scottish, Irish, and German, and Africans from Senegal to Congo. Baskets were integral in daily life, as agricultural equipment for gathering, sifting, storing, and serving the finished product, or as receptacles for tools, clothes, sacred objects, and even infants.
Initially, each culture had its own preferred basket material and method of manufacture – twilled rivercane for Native Americans, plaited oak for Europeans, and coiled grasses for Africans. Interaction between groups spurred adaptations to changing circumstances, such as the use of white oak by the Cherokee in the 1800s, as rivercane stands were decimated by European settlements. Native Americans also adopted the European picnic, flower, egg, and market baskets to sell in the 20th-century art market. Native and European Americans wove honeysuckle into baskets after 1854, when introduced from Japan. By the 17th century African Americans discovered bulrush along the coasts, coiling it into large, round “fanners” to winnow rice. Later bulrush was one medium among sweetgrass, pine needles, and palmetto, giving rise to the name “sweetgrass baskets” along the coast.
Today, basketweavers in the South from all three traditions are teaching the next generation to continue this art. Artists from across the region work with old and new materials in old and new forms, innovating for their legacy, for art’s sake, and for political causes, as embodied in the varied vessels in this exhibit and epitomized in the virtuosic miniature examples also on display.
The Bascom is open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. and Sunday from noon to 5:00 P.M. and is free to visit, thanks to the generosity of our sponsors and donors. For more information, please call us at (828) 526-4949 or visit our website at thebascom.org. The Bascom is located at 323 Franklin Road in Highlands, just across the covered bridge!
