Artwork Details
- Title
- From Traditional to Contemporary
- Artist
- Date
- 2021
- Location
- Dimensions
- 33 × 33 in. (83.8 × 83.8 cm)
- Credit Line
- Gift of Carolyn L. Mazloomi
- Mediums
- Mediums Description
- sweetgrass
- Classifications
- Highlights
- Keywords
- Object — other — basket
- Object Number
- 2022.6
Artwork Description
This is the most ambitious basket completed by Gullah weaver Corey Alston. Unlike many Gullah weavers, Alston did not learn the craft of coiling as a child because he was born into a family of blacksmiths. When he married into a family of sweetgrass weavers, his wife’s grandmother, the family matriarch and nationally acclaimed artist Mary Jane Manigault, gave her blessing for Alston to learn the family tradition.
Gullah people have been making sweetgrass baskets in the Lowcountry of South Carolina since the seventeenth century. Early “traditional” baskets were made by enslaved Africans to aid the cultivation of rice on plantations. Alston, a fifth-generation maker, shapes intricate patterns into “contemporary” sculptural baskets. He is currently teaching his daughter the process, sustaining memory and kinship coil by coil.
This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World, 2022
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