Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art

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

(4) "Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art" has been a long time coming. The idea germinated in 1990, while Dale Rosengarten was gathering data for her dissertation by surveying African baskets in selected museum collections. Her first stop was the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), where Enid Schildkrout was chief curator of African ethnology. In 1998 Rosengarten and Schildkrout traveled to Senegal to conduct field work for AMNH, and in 2001, they collaborated on a small exhibit of African and South Carolina baskets at the San Francisco International Airport. Though conditions were hardly ideal--space for images and texts was limited and exhibition objects were delayed in transit in the aftermath of 9/11--the curators regarded the show as a rehearsal for a more substantial exhibition featuring the links between African and South Carolina coiled basketry and the transformations the coiled basket had gone through over three momentous centuries. When Schildkrout joined the Museum for African Art as its chief curator in 2005, she proposed to mount a full-scale exhibit showcasing the baskets of two continents.

(5) A Kongo basket with a three-tiered lid, says religious scholar Fu-Kiau Bunseki-Lumanisa, would be used only in the upper world, not on a grave (personal communication with Dale Rosengarten, December 2, 1991). J. Lorand Matory cautions against a too-literal explanation of the Kongo cosmogram, noting that the term has no KiKongo counterpart (personal communication with Rosengarten, May 8, 1997).

(6) Robert Farris Thompson construes crosses chalked on the floor of shrines and altars in Cuba, Trinidad, St. Vincent, and especially Brazil as Kongo symbols. He admits that simple cruciforms may be "complex signs" fusing diverse elements--"a mixture of Kongo, Yoruba, Dahomean, Roman Catholic, Native American, and Spiritualist allusions"--but claims that in these New World examples, Kongo influence predominates (Thompson 1983:113; for further discussion of Kongoisms, see Rosengarten 1997:26, 88-91, 172-89).

(7) Huguette Van Geluwe, former Head of the Section of Ethnography at the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale, Turveren, Belgium, personal communication to Dale Rosengarten, July 26, 1990.

(8) "Occasionally," Joachim John Monteiro (1968:276-77) wrote in 1875, "in the case of a big 'soba,' there are several tiers of earth raised one above the other, and ornamented with broken glass and crockery and various figures representing 'fetishes,' and I have also seen a shade of sticks and grass erected over the whole, to keep it from the rain." Additionally, there is a 1930s photograph of G. I. Jones seated at a tiered grave in Nigeria, see http://mccoy.lib.siu.edu/mccall/jones (accessed November 5, 2007).

(9) Kate Porter Young, personal correspondence with Dale Rosengarten, March 14, 1994.

(10) A handful of Sea Islanders continued to make old-style baskets. With the death of Jannie Cohen of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, in 2002, the bulrush basket went out of production. Only on Sapelo Island, Georgia, where Allen Green taught several students, has the Sea Island basket been granted a new lease on life.