Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art

African Arts, Summer, 2009 by Enid Schildkrout, Dale Rosengarten, Theodore Rosengarten

GRASS ROOTS: AFRICAN ORIGINS OF AN AMERICAN ART

GIBBES MUSEUM OF ART

CHARLESTON, SC

AUGUST-NOVEMBER 2008

NATIONAL UNDERGROUND RAILROAD FREEDOM CENTER

CINCINNATI, OH

FEBRUARY s-APRIL 20, 2009

FOWLER MUSEUM AT UCLA

LOS ANGELES

OCTOBER 3, 2009-JANUARY 9, 2010

MCKISSICK MUSEUM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA

COLUMBIA, SC

FEBRUARY 13-MAY 8, 2010

MUSEUM FOR AFRICAN ART

NEW YORK

2010 EXACT DATES TO BE DETERMINED

"Grass Roots" was organized by the Museum for African Art in partnership with Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston, McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina, and the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival Association. The exhibition was supported, in part, by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, and the MetLife Foundation's Museums and Community Connections Program. The National Endowment for the Humanities honored "Grass Roots" with a "We the People--America's Historic Places" designation. The catalog was published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation.

Travelers to the regions of Africa which sent millions of people to the Americas from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries found no craft more common or varied than basketry. Made to be used and wear out, discarded and replaced, the humble African basket settled into European consciousness as an anonymous functional object, unworthy of collecting. Despite the many baskets that made their way into ethnographic collections in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, few were exhibited and virtually none became collected as works of art. In contrast, during the same period Native American baskets were coveted souvenirs in the tourist market in the southwestern United States and California, leading to what the anthropologist Frederick Starr described as a "fad" for Indian baskets. Traveling through the Congo in 1905, Starr collected many African examples and wondered whether the basket craze might one day encompass the marvelous examples he was finding on the continent. (1)

While the parameters of African art gradually came to encompass a wide range of African ritual and domestic objects, baskets are late entries into the corpus. "African Negro Art" an exhibition mounted by the Museum of Modern Art in 1935, was driven by the insight that African aesthetic principles were at work in the most mundane utensils, from spoons to headrests to hair combs embellished with figurative carvings. Nevertheless, except for a single, marvelous exception, a piece loaned by the Musee du Congo Belge at Turveren, baskets were not to be seen. Not until 1980, with the opening of "African Furniture and Household Objects," curated by Roy Sieber and Katherine C. White, was there a major art exhibition in the United States featuring African basketry. In this case, about two dozen baskets, all containers of one kind or another, were shown along with ceramics and wooden objects. More recently several publications and related exhibitions have explored southern African basketry, including Sonia Silva's A Vez dos Cestos/Time for Baskets (2003), David Arment and Marisa Fick-Jordan's Wired: Contemporary Zulu Telephone-Wire Baskets (2004), and A.B. Cunningham and M. Elizabeth Terry's African Basketry (2006). AS fiber and wire baskets from southern Africa have become more widely known, basketry has begun to move out of the realm of ethnography and into the consciousness of collectors and art museums.

African-American basketry has long been recognized as one of the oldest surviving African art forms in America. Virtually all accounts of Lowcountry basketry--from Rossa Cooley writing at the Penn School on St. Helena in 1905 through the exhibition "Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art," which opened at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina, in August 2008--concur on the African origins of the coiled grass tradition. Like contemporary African baskets, Low-country forms once regarded strictly as utilitarian objects are now admired and valued as works of art (Figs. 1-2).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

John Michael Vlach made this point emphatically in his seminal work, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (1978), the catalog for an exhibition mounted by the Cleveland Museum of Art. Eight years later, McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina mounted a full retrospective, "Row Upon Row: Sea Grass Baskets of the South Carolina Lowcountry. " (2) Both exhibits called attention to the ongoing vitality of the tradition and emphasized the "Africanness" of the baskets. A profound connection to Africa seemed self-evident, sustained more by faith and intuition than by rigorous research. What was known for certain was that Africans brought to the Lowcountry as captives came from cultures with a diversity of basket-making traditions. Surrounded by grasses and sedges native to the coastal wetlands, enslaved Africans employed the technique of coiling to make a wide winnowing basket known as a "fanned' an essential tool for processing rice. Through 170 years of slavery and now 150 years of freedom, the descendants of the original African agriculturists have made coiled baskets without interruption.