A Summer of Baskets: Basketry of the Americas Panel Presentation and Demonstrations

Public Panel Presentation and Demonstrations

Indian basket expert Terry DeWald will lead a discussion among international master basket weavers from Arizona, North West Coast, Panama and South Africa. In conjunction with Woven Identities and the International Folk Art Market. At the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture.       

A cross-cultural basket-weaving demonstration and dialogue with Basketry Artists.

Terrol Dew Johnson, Tohono O'odham basketmaker and community activist.  Terrol has won top awards for his beargrass, yucca,devil's claw and gourd baskets at Santa Fe Indian Market, The Heard Museum Indian Market and Southwest Museum's Indian Art Fair.  Terrol is also an advocate for traditional dessert foods to preserve health and sustainability and won the Ford Foundation's Leadership for a Changing World Award in 2002.

 Loa Ryan is a member of the Tisimshian tribe and a master basket weaver. Ryan resumed the family basket weaving tradition that was last practiced by two of her great-grandmothers, who inspired Loa with their use of baskets to collect salmon and wild berries. Ryan learned her techniques from a Haida woman, Delores Churchill, who, fearing the tradition would be lost, took up Tsimshian basketry. She works, through teaching basket making, to revive interest within the urban Tsimshian community of their culture and heritage. Loa has been awarded many Folk Arts Grants  and Loa has earned top awards for her Tsimshian baskets. She was awarded “Outstanding Tsimshian” award, presented to her by the Tsimshian tribe in Vancouver, BC on September 5, 2000. Her baskets can be found at the NMAI, Smithsonian, Burke Museum, and Anchorage Indian Heritage Center and many private collections.

Folk Art Maket artist Idaira Cabezón Mepaquito, and translator Anadelina Barrigón, will represent the indigenous Wounaan Culture of Panama.   Wounaan rainforest baskets are painstakingly made of chunga palm fiber that is collected, bundled and braided, bleached and boiled in natural dyebaths or submerged in river mud, before being stitched and coiled into baskets infused with geometric or floral and faunal designs. The Wounaan people have been fighting to gain ownership of their ancestral lands even as their traditional natural resources are endangered by outside development.  While Wounaan baskets are renowned worldwide for their quality and beauty, they are still under-appreciated in Panama.

Terry Dewald, an expert on Native American art from Tucson, Arizona, will moderate the event. Entrance is by museum admission.