coming up on craft in america. it really started when i got out of the army,i didn’t want to be ever regimented again. i started making furniture a long time ago,but it never occurred to me that, you know, i didn’t know anybody did this. there is a lineage that goes back centuriesand millennia, in fact. my ancestors kept this tradition with thembecause they wanted the future generation to have these baskets as evidence of wherethey came from. glass. clay.
wood. fiber. metal. human hands transform humble materials intoworks of function and beauty, creating objects that hold the memory of who we are as people. how are the traditions of craft kept vitalby today’s finest artists? and how has the legacy of craft been reimaginedas a modern artform. i just do this by eye. i don’t call myself a craftsman, i callmyself a woodworker.
i like the warmth of the wood. “let’s get a clamp and put one together.†i’ve been doing this now for 60 years, andi still can’t believe that i’ve been able to make a living and be successful. this art form, or this basketry, it was broughtfrom west africa with my ancestors, who were brought as slaves. and i have just a real strong feeling aboutmaking every stitch. my mother taught me, and her mother taughther and i’ve taught my children.
i started out doing just traditional designs,but as i do designs, uh, my mind works faster than my hands. and then i had my own interpretations, so,i enjoy doing both – contemporary, but i still want to keep true to the traditions. people ask me, “why you do this stuff?†and the only answer i have is i want to seewhat it looks like. i can put it in my head, but i get a kickout of seeing what it looks like on the floor. oh, this is scary stuff, this gold-leaf, it’sso damn fragile. the tradition of furniture making, i’m surei’m in it because i’m doing it.
i know i’m outside the tradition of sammaloof in that, but i’m still a furniture maker and we’re brothers in, you know, brothersin arms or bonds or saws. there are times while i’m working in theforge where i feel that i’m part of a continuum. and in those moments i feel a definite connectionwith all the elder smiths who’ve gone before me. acknowledging that inheritive history is akey element in producing new work that has this affinity with the past, while it’sfinding a new use or a new purpose in my time. for centuries, every tool, every vessel, everyobject was made by hand. then, in the late 18th century all that changed,the industrial revolution ushered in a new age of production.
manual labor began to be replaced by machinery,and the world was forever altered. the mechanical world offered one series ofopportunities. on the part of some people, there was a sensitivityto the way in which the machine was affecting people’s lives, was disciplining people's lives, was narrowing life experience. in england, a new philosophy was born as areaction to an increasingly industrialized world. the arts and crafts movement rejected thenotion that mass-produced, machine-made objects were necessarily better for either the consumer or the designer. it advocated a return to well-made, handcraftedobjects, and a reconnection to both the artistic process, and the natural world.
textile designer, william morris, was at theforefront of this movement. he believed in the nobility of craftsmanship,that artistry and humanity did have a place in the creation of everyday objects. morris felt the decorative nature of the environmentin which we live is expressive, it is important, it must be considered. and, therefore, planted a seed which beganto perculate out from england, throughout europe, and, eventually to the united stateswhere they had profound impact on many, many people, and inspired reaction that is stillin motion today. i want a chair to be very beautiful, i wanta chair that is good to the eye, and i want
a chair, above all, that is comfortable. a chair should invite you to sit. it has to give you good back support. i’ve had people say that my furniture isart, that it’s sculpture, it’s this and that but i really don’t care what they callit, as long as i’m happy with what it is. this is larry white and larry was my veryfirst employee. and how long, larry? but this is, this is beautiful fiddle back. when he oils it, it’s going to be just knockout.
i like to work in wood, it’s a very sensuousmaterial, i love the color of the different kinds of woods that i use. this is a chair that we made some years ago,and somebody bought it at auction and brought it back to me to be oiled. each of the boys, uh, well we all have ourhands in everything that goes out of here. i have found that my furniture has withstoodthe test of time. these are chairs, we just finished a hugedining table and these are the dining chairs that go with it. these are chair seats that i’m going toput legs on.
we do everything to order. it isn’t a production shop, don’t haveparts all over the place that we’re waiting to put together. when you’re working, there’s a communionbetween the object maker and the material he or she is working with. and then it transcends into something muchgreater when you make something and someone likes it, enjoys it and all, you’re paid tenfold. yeah, that’s going to be all right. there it is.
i’m getting too old for this, i guess ishould go and lie down once in a while, but i don’t. chuckles i love what i do. i’m 90 and i can still work. chuckles. it really started when i got out of the army,i didn’t want to work for anyone, i didn’t want to be ever regimented again. so i went right to work at what i really liked,the graphic arts, at scripps college graduate school. i was at the school one day in the courtyard,and i saw this girl clear across, and i looked
at her and i thought, well, that’s the mostbeautiful girl i’ve ever, ever seen. and she walked all across this courtyard tome and said, “pardon, but could you tell me where the office is?†i said, “i’ll not only tell you, i’lltake you.†and, i’d go back about twice a week, neversaw her. and, come september, i was at the same spot, she entered at the same spot, lookedup and walked over to me and said, “hello, sammy,†and three months later we were married. freda was the heart and soul of what i do. when i married freda, i think we didn’thave any furniture at all in the house, so,
i made furniture for her. i made it out of dunnage that i found alongthe railroad track. and a magazine heard about it and sent a photographer out. i was published in a national magazine and people started writing to me so, on the strength of that, i quit my joband started making furniture. she became my partner in more ways than one. she was sort of my protector. if it hadn’t been for her, i think i would’vequit a long time ago, but she said, “we can do it, we can do it.â€
and so we did it, together. well, this is the first chair i ever madeand i, i liked it, i thought it was very simple and all. and i’d gotten to, a little bit known, andi entered this chair in the show, the los angeles art museum, and it was rejected. and i got a slip, i can always remember fredaat the sink, washing dishes, and she said, “any good mail?†and i said, “no, look at this.†and she read it, and it was a rejection slip.
and i thought she’d throw her arms aroundme and tell me that they didn’t know what they weredoing, and she calmly put it down, turned away, kept washing dishes and said, “sam,rejection is good for the ego.†and i never forgot it, i never, ever forgotthat. i didn’t know anything about the craft movementat all. i just started working and then, one day, i received a letter from the craft counciland invited me to show a piece. the first conference that we had was at asilomar. there were a lot of craftsmen, like bob stockdaleand art carpenter, and wharton esherick, walker weed, and all.
and there were about four of us on the panel,and they were challenging us, i know they were. they said, “making a piece of furnituretakes weeks, months to make, where you design it and the factory can turn them out by thedozens,†and that type of talk or… “what makes you think you can make a livingat what you’re doing?†well, you know, those are kind of hard questions,because you don’t know if you’re going to be able to make a living. all of us in the panel just sat there likedummies and i finally spoke up and i said, “you know, as for me, if charles eames wantsto design plastic bowls to sell by the thousands, i think it’s his privilege.
but, as for me, i’d rather work the wayi’m working. uh, i can’t produce very much, but i getthe pleasure of making the piece, i get the pleasure of meeting the people.†and i said, “i’m going to continue thatway.†well, after it was over, wharton esherick,who was a real, you know, dogmatic kind of a guy, he said, “young man, come here.†and i went over to him and i thought, “oh,hell, he’s going to bawl me out about something.†and he said, “i heard what you said, anddon’t you ever change,†and i haven’t.
i followed what i wanted to do. i didn’tlet what was popular guide me. the material i’m using is palmetto. i use a specific sable palmetto that’s nativeto the area where i live here. it produces very strong frond, so i’m ableto pull very tight, sewing the grasses, which is sweet grass, this is a grass that we findnative to this area that has been used for making these baskets for over 300 years. see, we’re adding new grass, when you putthe new sweet grass right here. this art form of basketry originated fromwest africa, the senegalese area and senegambia, some parts of the ivory coast.
my ancestors, who was brought from africaas slaves, found these grasses resembled what they used in africa. so, soon, i’ll be ready to start addingbulrush. so, you start out with bulrush, or pine needles? see, this is pine needles. and, then, this is sweet grass, right? (m hm) but i have the pine needles that startedright there. actually, your mom did this section for me. i think i remember that.
you think you remember that? (yeah) strong hands, right? (m hm) chuckles the slave owners came to realize that thesebaskets were very important, because many did not have basket makers on their plantations,and they all needed containers to hold the grains or use in the rice fields. and this is one of the reason why this artform is still in place today, because they regarded my ancestors as the more valuableslaves, so they didn’t separate the family. the technique is still very much the same.
this art form involved the total family. men, traditionally, harvest the grasses fromthe marshes and the swamps, and the women and girls made baskets. so, families were always together workingin this tradition. i learned this during the summer months whenschool was closed, growing up. every summer i practiced making baskets, itwas a way of life for my family. after we had gotten through with our morningchores, we would all assemble in my grandmother’s front yard, under big trees, and we wouldsit and make baskets. and i’m very fortunate to say that i camefrom a family that made beautiful baskets
chuckles, so it was, it was stiff competitionwith everyone. i never liked any bit of it because it wasjust time consuming and my friends, in other communities, they didn’t have to make thesebaskets, but my parents felt that they wanted us to learn. so, i had learned all the traditional designs,basic techniques, and then i started designing forms that are different from the traditionalones, contemporary designs with sweeping handles and flat baskets with grasses flowing fromit. and i would kind of keep my design secretuntil after it was made, and then i would show it chuckles to everyone.
and they were just amazed. i went to secretarial school in new york,and trained to be a secretary, and that’s what i did for 10 years. then, my son, who was 18 months old, was diagnosedfor chronic asthma, and i had to give up working to be home with him, so i needed somethingto supplement my family’s income. and i remember my mother telling me, wheni was a little girl, “one day you might want to know how to do this, you should learnit. and it’s good to learn more than one thing,because you never know.†and then i thought, well, i will sell my basketsthat i had made a whole collection for my
personal use in my home, i will take themto the city market. i was overwhelmed with the response, theyloved my work. this was something new that i was introducingand that was kind of scary, you know, whether or not people would see these as too far out. and that was the beginning of my career asa basket maker. and, within a couple of years i got an invitationto show my work to the smithsonian institution, and people started commissioning me. i was very happy about that. it’s a feeling of my ancestors, and howproud they would be if they were here.
in indian culture, when we’re born, we haveceremonies for the child. and, then, when the child turns roughly ayear old, or even older, we give them a name, an ancestor’s name. and, so, suddenly, we have a birth again ofthe ancestor who is going to live through this child, with this child, and guide thischild. so, that’s sort of our concept of time,meaning we have no real end, and we have no beginning. everything is connected like a circle. and, so, this concept of our lifecycle asa circle is really emphasized in our baskets,
because our baskets are not only cylindrical,but a lot of our designs are connected. so you don’t know where they begin and wherethey end, so, we just have to learn how to read the basket. the materials i work with are always specialto me because i know there’s beauty within the plant fiber. so, whenever i harvest any kind of a plant,i offer a prayer to that plant because that plant is offering itself, not only tome, but to my basket, to my culture, and to the future generations who’ll be seeingit. so, the baskets, to a weaver, are almost likea living entity.
i’m enrolled in the wasco nation. the wasco people lived along the columbiariver for generations and generations. and, when our ancestors lived along the columbiariver and harvested all the salmon, we always caught more salmon than we could possiblyeat for the entire year. and we would dry the salmon, and when we poundedit, it would be a concentrated protein. this concentrated protein, we put in big baskets,and this was a popular trade item. so the people in the missouri river traderoute, (the hidatsah, mandan, the sioux) they all knew of the wasco people because of thepounded salmon, and they all knew of those baskets. this basket was probably made between 1850and maybe 1880.
these long, large figures represent our ancestors. and this little figure here is a person, andjust how important our ancestors are to the person. these images are images of condors, and theseare found on a lot of wasco baskets. condors used to live in the columbia gorgefor generations, up until about the early 1900s when they became extinct. and i think they became extinct because peoplejust shot ‘em, when the euro-americans were moving into our area. this is a recent basket i did about a yearago.
this is the image of a condor. and, now, what we now see are airplanes. i was born on the confederated tribes of warmsprings reservation, in central oregon. it’s a high desert, semiarid area. in the 1850s, when a lot of americans weremoving westward, they wanted agricultural land, they wanted to be near rivers, and theylooked on us as savages. and, so, we were forced to sign a treaty,which forced us from our traditional land along the columbia river. i grew up not knowing anyone who made thebaskets.
i thought that that whole technique had diedout, that i would never see anyone weave a basket. it just never dawned on me, not only would i not see someone weave a basket, but it never entered my mind that i would eventuallybecome a basket weaver. i worked for roughly 17 years as a mathematician. and, like all women who are professional,we hit the glass ceiling, and i hit it hard. and i decided, i don’t want to fight this,what i want to do is something i enjoy. so, i thought, i’m going to commit myselfto reviving my culture through weaving wasco baskets. when i first learned, i felt i should be trueto my culture and learn the traditional designs,
so i took the pains to grab all of them whilei studied them in museums. this is probably one of the oldest designsbecause it’s based on the wasco basket collected by lewis and clark in 1805, when they camedown to our area along the columbia river. and it’s very, very intricate. the lewis and clark basket eventually woundup at the peabody museum. so, i went and studied it. when i was in the museum and i was holdingthat basket, it was literally communicating with me through its own way when i was holdingit. and it really told me its own story.
and its story was based on our historic petroglyphs. the petroglyphs were done along the columbiariver for thousands of years, and these images were really our ancestors. and the geometric outline around each of thefaces was a symbol of our fishing nets. so here was again, this circle with no beginningand no end, which connected, not only myself to my ancestors, but connected me to the columbiariver. when i came home from the museum, i wantedto do my own interpretations of the basket. so, just as examples, the traditional faceon the 1805 basket was like this image, and the images were oriented in this direction.
but, there’s always somebody in the crowdthat’s a little bit different, so i had to put one that was facing the different direction. and i put one in that’s whistling. and here is a face going… throwing you akiss. and, then, finally, i had to have one thatwas smiling, so this is the smiling face. so i think baskets do, not only tell theirown stories, but they have their own unique life. aluminum. color core, i love this stuff. i started making furniture a long time ago,but it never occurred to me that, really in
a way, that people make furniture, you know,i didn’t think anybody did this. i’ve chosen to work with color because iwant to try to do something that really pushes, you know, really pushes me. i wanted to use the foil of that late 19thcentury caf㩠chair against something actually very modern: modern color, modern materials. so i didn’t want a wood top. and aluminum is so stable and so strong, andi can mount these bolts under here. hey, allison, you want to give me a hand? make sure those pop in the hole back there.
look at that! fits. so that’s it, that’s gonna be, this isa hall table and chair. i like to use green because it’s so hardto work with. i like that challenge, so making a green chairis tough, but if you incorporate a lot of gold, you’re safe. when i made this i wasn’t a chair maker,and i put, you know, kind of my hallmark, you know, this line. i see people make something all rectilinear,they can be very nice.
and i see people make things with curves inhere, all curves, and make it kinda boring. so you need to, you need a foil, you know,so, i try to do that. i went to art school and i started out asa painter, but i immediately found the sculpture studio, i mean that’s, i spent all my timethere. and i really, i like three-dimensional work. arts and crafts was absolute freedom for me. i found myself in a class, i had a camelcigarette in one hand, a piece of charcoal in the other, and a beer on the table nextto me, and a naked woman in front of me. what the hell!
i’m gonna be an artist. you notice i’m measuring this very carefully i knew him in high school. we didn’t date in high school or anything,we got together after high school and then we lost contact, and then i justlooked him up one day. he was just interesting, really very comfortableto be around. when she knocked at my door, i was sittingthere listening to music, and, you know, we had a dutch door with a glass window. and there was sylvia.
all right sweetie, let’s go out and havea little lunchie. and not too long after, we were married. here, really? sit in these dumb chairs? then i had to make a living, i had a wifeand three kids, and so i started that little business. some amazing fortuitous things. meeting my wife and making roach clips, justat the right moment. you know, some people just get to be in theright moment of life, you know, and sylvia knocked at my door one day, and the flowerpeople came to frisco.
you can’t believe what the haight ashburywas, it was, damn, it was really good. so i would spend a couple of weeks hammeringout roach clips, and they’d buy ‘em from me. i made millions of roach clips. and i was big man on campus over there, iwas the roach clip mogul. god, those are, god bless the hippies. oh they loved it, they loved anything ugly. my movement into craft, i guess, for lackof a better word, started with the clocks. and they were small, and i didn’t have verymany tools here. how the hell did i make this?
it says, “1974, i still love her.†and then i think, i, said, well, i need somewooden cases in each clock. so i got a few tools, and it just happenedvery slowly. i was starting to make furniture, but, jesus,man, i didn’t know anything about it. i mean, i really didn’t, i mean, i justsaid, i think i’ll make furniture. i mean, it’s like, i think i’ll make arocket ship, you know, i mean it’s, god, you have no skills, you have no training,you, you know, you don’t know anything about it. but it was like, that’s a good idea, i,watch this, you know, worked out. so, that’s how i got into furniture.
i like furniture. i can think furniture, i can see furniture. and i can see it up here. well a motivated series is like somethingi want to do, like make benches or lamps or something like that. and then each one feeds on the next. i’m kind of a loner in a way, i, i don’tsee myself as a traditionalist, i hope i’m, at times, carving a little bit of new ground. you know, garry made this cabinet some yearsback, really beautifully crafted thing, really
incredible surfaces. and then, inside of it was this big nail,crooked, bent nail that he drove into it. it was almost, it was beyond my skills atthe time to make that. and then as i got further and further intothis thing, i just started getting so pissed off at it because it was getting so precious. and that’s probably when i decided, as arthurdanto said, “he put beauty on his knee, and he spanked her.†so the nail had to be. it just had to be.
and i asked him, “did you do that just topiss people of, because it sure works.†that’s how i felt about it. but now that i think about it after, you know,years of hindsight, i think it was a touch of genius. uh, he’s an iconoclast, you know, he likesto put people to the test. it’s all in good fun, of course, but helikes to do it. driving that nail was really big deal in mylife. i mean, that nail cabinet just put me on thewoodworker’s map. i’m so sick and tired of talking about thenail cabinet.
so, okay, is that good? there’s something inexplicable about whyi chose to be a blacksmith, having decided at 14 to begin this work, and realize thatthere is a lineage that goes back centuries and millennia, in fact. if one were to look at the molecular structureof iron, any bar on the rack, you would most likely find fragments of farm tools and weaponsin 1000 ad, in the very beginnings of iron forgings. it’s also possible that part of my grandfather’scar, you know, is also inside, you know, this bar, this salvaged material that is continuallybeing refined. so there’s this inherited history that’stied up in each one of the pieces.
when i was 16 i ran across a hoe, a farmingtool that had been patched by a blacksmith seven times. and this piece, has really informed the workprobably more than any other piece that i’ve encountered, and it’s partly due to thefact that my mother being a quilt maker, and my father being an amateur archaeologist andthinking about the fragments of things and their use within the culture. it has taught me, of course, the value inthe smallest of pieces that are generated in the shop. so, i save all of the fragments from my largercommissions and then forge vessels, bowls,
wall pieces from those fragments. perhaps one of the most important projectsthat used and incorporated these found fragments would be the baptismal font that i forgedfor the santa maria de la paz catholic community. i asked the parishioners to donate piecesof iron that reminded them of their past, and then forged each one into an individualplate that then was reassembled like a quilt, it surrounded the water. the whole idea, of course being that the babiesare baptized in the ancestry of this entire community. in the case of the rio grande gates for thealbuquerque museum of art, i asked that community
members help clean about a quarter mile stretchof the rio grande. and it was great, we, over several days cleanedout car springs and 55 gallon drums and all kinds of things made of iron that we thenforged and folded into individual panels. so, what we’re gonna do today is make apair of tongs. so the first step is making the shoulder…so let’s turn to the left, diagonal blows. teaching blacksmithing is important to mebecause it is an oral tradition. try to tilt your hammer, you see how it’sgoing thinner here, so try to be really square to the anvil face. in many different parts of africa, the fatherwould forge a hammer for his son, and take
a small piece of his own hammer and fire weldthat into the hammer that he’s making for this next generation. get the tips first on both sides. so there’s a remembrance of the teachings,a physical remainder of your teacher, and that this is the object that is facilitatingall the work that you’ll do for the rest of your life. all right, you guys ready to give it a whirl? i don’t know. when i was 11, my mother moved to new mexicoto the small farming community of el rito.
for three summers i worked as an assistantwith peter wells, who had a printing shop. but he also had a blacksmiths shop set upto do repair work for village farmers, and it was during those sessions working in theforge that i realized this is really what i wanted to do. then peter moved his print shop to a townoutside of albuquerque and wanted to leave the blacksmith’s shop intact in el rito,and offered it to me for $27 a month rent, and i quit high school and started workingas a smith. i remember telling my parents, and specificallythe great aunt mary, who i had been living with as a teenager that i wanted to becomea blacksmith.
and my aunt’s reaction was to immediatelycry. so at 16, i received a basis in tool smithing,assisting farmers in making tools, repairing tools, taking really anything that came throughthe door. and it was a great learning experience beingthrown into the practical aspect, you know, head first. and it wasn’t for several years before commissionscame in regularly and my family came to visit the shop and realized, you know, that it wasa viable means of livelihood. for many years i produced hardware for furniturecompanies and custom furniture designers, and began working with different contractorswho were building detail oriented homes where
i could supply the hardware and the kitchentools and fireplace implements. many of us learning blacksmithing in the early70s looked towards the master smiths that had produced this work during the early partof the century. in trying to design within my own vocabularybased on these historic styles, but rather designing something that would be appropriatefor the architecture in which it was being placed. fortunately, the architects and other clientsthat i was working with were also interested in seeing a different kind of expression. the entrance gates made for the solesombraproperty was based on a 1930s deco approach to design, which resulted in a stylized formof cloud with vertical rain falling beneath it.
being a blacksmith has exposed me to a longhistory of making, and that provides a kind of fuel to bring towards any of the work imake. i am very fortunate that i’m still ableto work doing what i really love. and still, to this moment, if it hadn’tbeen for my late wife, freda, i would have never done it. she kept me on the track. this is the first of this design that i’vemade. and there’s an awful lot of work in oneof these, it’s just an awful lot of work, and they all have their own personalities.
the walnut has its own personalities. this happens to have a very colorful seat,i like the seat an awful lot. the boys know how to do it without me tellingme them how to do it, they usually improve what i’ve done, but i do it in the rough,and they can carry it on from there. we get a lot of repeat clients, and i thinki’m working for the third generation now. i think a little bit of me goes with everypiece that i make, i really do, i think it… there’s a renewal that takes place. something goes and it’s like letting a childgo. you know, the fellas have been with me fora long time, and we’re partners rather than,
you know, i’m their boss, and all. i have first say on laughs what they do andall, but, but, it… it’ll carry on after i’m gone. all right, turn it over. garry’s very visual, and he works thingsout in his head long before he sits down to do it. see anything we’ve missed? but i’ve also seen him sit down and start something one way and all of a sudden it’s taking a whole another direction.
so often he’s responding to the material,and it might become a table, it might become a desk. this is a series of things i’ve been doing,i, you know, i got tired of making chairs, so i’m propping these up and then i’mhitting them with a real hard light and i’m pulling these shadows out, and weird thingshappen with these shadows. actually the first one was, a friend of minegame me an eames chair that used to be a studio chair. and i kept looking at that thing, and i said,“well, i can do something with that.†so what i did is i sawed it directly in halfwith a band saw and i mounted between a sheet
of aluminum, and a terrific piece, you know. and that was part of the first chair i cutin half, and it took me, i guess another 15 or 20 years to start sawing them in half again. i’ll find out where i want that shadow, and then i’ll trace that on there, and spend a lot of time painting. now, a hundred years from now, in the antiqueroad show, one of those guys is going to say, “whoa, do you know what you have? geez!†you, you know, so, that’d be really cool,be, that’s the only reason i want afterlife,
fly on the wall, whatever, man, just be ableto see how good you were. i like the idea of now i can kind of playart guy, maybe some day i’ll be a full-fledged art guy. i’ve always been interested in a conceptualapproach to design. i started out as an architectural smith, however,that is only one aspect to being a blacksmith. i felt it was important to know the materialsand processes well enough to be able to exploit them to advantage with making sculpture andother experimental works. several years ago a friend of mine took meto an industrial forge outside chicago, and there i realized that 250 million pounds ofiron were being forged each year and generating
a tremendous amount of scrap. i decided to negotiate a possibility of beingable to come and use this scrap material to forge sculpture. so we’re going to have stacks of cubes outand we’re going to squeeze them down about 60% of their height. the processes that this forge uses to producetheir work is very similar to what i would do in the shop, only on a larger scale. so, drawing material out, folding, forging,you know, is all the same. so, we speak the same language.
so this first one we’ll pull out down to16 and 5/8. so making sculpture in forged iron while i’min the factory and watching the process in its entirety, there is an evolution, and theconceptual basis for the sculpture that i see very clearly in the beginning ends upbeing developed over a process of making the piece. the sculpture is informed by the fact thatevery material has an equally complex history. blacksmithing or making art, there is no separation,you know, between those two endeavors. it’s as inseparable as the life i live herewith my wife, julie and our two children. it’s as inseparable as growing a garden. it is a life and it is a full life.
and there is no differentiation between artand life. this museum is very special for me becausemy mother would bring us here when we were very little. so i remember as a little girl walking aroundhere and looking at these baskets, and she really had pride in her voice when she’dsay, “this is a wasco basket.†people don’t necessarily have to know everythingabout that basket, but if they can see the beauty, if they can see the geometrics init, then that pleases me. and i enjoy having my baskets in museums,because i think museums are the places where the maximum amount of people can see and appreciatemy work.
what i’m really doing is creating a newentity. this is part of my culture, it is part ofmy obligations to my ancestors to keep this part of our culture alive. in working as an artist in basketry, i wantedto do sculptural forms. this tradition always maintained a beautifulbasket for everyday living. it should be beautiful, so it is constructedas a work of art, but then a useful art. after the plantation system was over, my ancestorskept this tradition with them. they never allowed the tradition to die, becausethey wanted the future generation to have these baskets as evidence of where they camefrom, and that our history should never be
repeated. so from mother to daughter to granddaughter,it is passed down and my mother taught me how to make it, and her mother taught her,my children, i’ve taught them as well. put some sweet grass in. and remember to open the row up… there. you’re doing very good. thank you. you’re welcome. weaving is almost like penmanship, almostlike a handwriting.
and i’ve seen the similarities - my mother’swork, my work, my grandmother’s work and my great grandmother’s work. and that’s kind of neat. it’s little things like that, that stillencourages me to carry on the tradition. i would like to someday, if i have my ownchildren, to pass this down. i think it’s important because if i don’tdo it, then i, i’d feel probably like i’m… almost like breaking the tradition or something,or something like that. so, i think that’s important to do. i have a commitment to carry on this tradition.
it’s tough work, but i have a real strongfeeling about doing this. when i hold a piece of another person’swork in my hand, i feel an affinity towards that artist who has thought carefully aboutwhat it is that they’re producing. there’s no question that the informationhas been passed, as almost a form of grace.