Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art

Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art is on exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington through November 28, 2010. It will move to the National Museum for African Art in New York from April through October 2011.

Among the many cultural traditions that link Africa and America, one of the most beautiful is the weaving of coiled baskets. This craft was brought from West and Central Africa to the American Colonies more than 300 years ago and is still passed from generation to generation among the Gullah/Geechee people of South Carolina and Georgia.

Once used for processing grain and storing food, coiled sweetgrass baskets—also called Lowcountry baskets, after the marshy coastal areas and islands of America’s southeast coast—are now recognized as works of art by museums, galleries and collectors around the world.

Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art, an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, describes how the Gullah, descendants of African slaves, use the techniques of their ancestors to make tightly woven, coiled baskets from materials native to the coastal dunes of the Carolinas: sweetgrass, bulrush, saw palmetto and pine needles.

“Baskets are containers of memory,” said Enid Schildkrout, chief curator of the exhibition. She said that in the Gullah community of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, near Charleston, Lowcountry baskets are an important symbol of African-American identity.

Rice Cultivation and Baskets

The Grass Roots exhibition also traces the connection between the African coiled basket and the most important agricultural commodity in the Carolinas and Georgia during the era of slavery: rice.

From the late 1600s to 1865, African slaves “were imported into the southeast coastal region specifically because they had knowledge of rice cultivation in marshy areas,” said Schildkrout, director of exhibitions at New York’s Museum for African Art, which organized the Grass Roots exhibition. Rice planters in the United States paid higher prices for slaves from the ‘rice coast’ of Africa. The Africans not only knew how to grow rice, they knew how to process it. As part of this laborious process, they used flat coiled baskets, or “fanners,” to winnow the rice.

About 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to America’s southeastern coastal region came from West Africa (the upper Guinea coast), 40 percent from Congo/Angola and the rest from elsewhere, Schildkrout said.

Elsie McCabe, president of the Museum for African Art, said she grew up “learning that the African contributions to the building of America were a strong back and broad shoulders—brawn.” The exhibition made her see that “they also contributed technical know-how. There was a lot that Africans could share and, in fact, teach.”

Henrietta Snype talks about the craft of sweetgrass basket weaving at the Charles Pinckney National Historic Site in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.

After learning this “about my own ancestry,” McCabe said, “I stood up a little taller.”

A Community of Basketmakers

One of the highlights of Grass Roots is a display of sweetgrass baskets made by five women representing different generations of the Snype family of Mount Pleasant. “My grandmother told me this is an African art,” said Henrietta Snype. “When the slaves settled in Mount Pleasant, they brought the skills with them.” She pointed out the baskets made by each family member, including her grandmother, mother, daughter and granddaughter (who was 7 years old when she made her first basket).

“Every mother would teach her daughters—like my grandmother taught my mother, my mother taught me, and now my daughter and granddaughter know how to do it,” Snype said. “None of these baskets reflects one person; it reflects an entire community.”

Many basketmakers—both men and women—sell their work from stands along the highway as well as in markets, museum shops and online. Elaborate baskets, which can take weeks to make, can fetch hundreds of dollars. “They can get more money for their baskets now because there has been a lot of recognition,” Snype said. “It has become known as an art form. Sweetgrass baskets are recognized all over the world now.”

Perhaps the most famous sweetgrass basketmaker is Mary Jackson from Johns Island, near Charleston. Her work has been recognized with a MacArthur Fellowship (commonly called the “genius grant”), and in 2010 she was named a Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts. Some of her baskets are in the Smithsonian exhibition.

Whenever her work receives recognition, it helps the whole basketry community, Jackson said in an interview with the Washington Post. That matters because there is concern that fewer young people are interested; also, real estate development is reducing the land where sweetgrass and bulrush grow.

Both Jackson and Snype work hard to educate others about their art. Snype teaches and lectures in schools and universities, including internationally, about the history and craft of sweetgrass basket making.

“It’s a wonderful art form. It’s a proud heritage,” she said.

And she remains optimistic. “I’ve heard people say this is a dying art,” Snypes said. “It’s not dying. It can’t be dying—it’s at the Smithsonian right now.”

Article by Lousie Fenner, 25 October 2010

See the exhibition website which includes a information about the exhibition, a photo gallery and a guide for teachers.

Source : All Africa

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