Woven Identities Exhibit Opening

For the first time in over 30 years, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture opens a major exhibition of North American Indian baskets on Sunday, November 20, 2011. The exhibition runs through April 1, 2014. Opening events are 10am-4pm on Sunday November 20th. NM residents with i.d. are free on Sundays, children under 17 always free.

Trunk Show  10am – 4pm.Terry DeWald of Terry DeWald American Indian Art will be holding a basket trunk show on both Saturday and Sunday. He will be bring 50 – 75 baskets for sale

Basket Making Demonstration by Haida Weaver Jacinthe Two Bulls from 12 pm to 4 pm. She will be giving a short talk on her craft at 12:30 pm. Jacinthe Two Bulls learned to weave Haida baskets at the age of seven from her mother, Vicki LeCornu. She  learned how to gather and prepare cedar bark and spruce roots from her mother and her maternal Uncle, Douglas Burgess. They taught her to respect the material, and her environment. Jacinthe has now been weaving for 21 years, and has found the confidence in the past year to experiment outside of traditional Haida basket weaving. 

Terry DeWald will be giving a talk on basket materials at 2 pm  using baskets from his collection as examples:  Identifying Baskets of the Western United States: Tribes, Materials, and Motifs.

To read a basket five principal traits must be taken into account: material, construction, form and design, and utility. Woven Identities is divided into five sections representing these essential and diagnostic Native American basketry traits. If you ever wanted to learn the language of baskets, begin your journey with this exhibition.

On exhibit are baskets woven by artists representing 60 cultural groups, today referred to as tribes, bands, or pueblos. The weavers’ ancestral lands are in six culture areas of Western North America: The Southwest, Great Basin, Plateau, California, the Northwest Coast, and the Arctic.

Baskets can be functional. Burden baskets were for carrying. The improbable task of cooking was done in baskets—heated stones were added to food and liquid contents in meal preparation. Water was carried and clams collected in others. Baskets also served as hats (especially, but not exclusively, to the tourist trade).

Yet, function does not trump beauty. Basket making techniques are inherently attractive. Among the baskets on view are examples of false embroidery, cross weave, plaiting, and coiling. Materials like wrapped twine, corn husk, roots, rhizomes, stems, branches, leaves, grass, and cedar bark add their own good looks.

Of the 241 baskets in the exhibition, only 45 have been attributed to individual artists. Woven Identities honors those weavers and the many others whose names we do not yet know.