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    A Measure of the Earth: The Cole-Ware Collection of American Baskets
    A Measure of the Earth: The Cole-Ware Collection of American Baskets
    A Measure of the Earth: The Cole-Ware Collection of American Baskets
    Ebook255 pages1 hour

    A Measure of the Earth: The Cole-Ware Collection of American Baskets

    By Nicholas R. Bell and Henry Glassie

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    About this ebook

    A Measure of the Earth provides an unparalleled window into an overlooked corner of recent American history: the traditional basketry revival of the past fifty years. Steve Cole and Martha Ware amassed a remarkable collection using the most stringent guidelines: baskets made from undyed domestic materials that have been harvested by the maker. An essay by Nicholas Bell details the long-standing use of traditional fibers such as black ash and white oak, willow and sweetgrass, and the perseverance of a select few to claim these elements--the land itself--for the enrichment of daily life. As they trek through woods, fields, farm, and shore in the quest for the right ingredients for a basket, these men and women cultivate an enviable knowledge of the land. Each basket crafted from this knowledge provides not only evidence of this connection to place, but also a measure of the earth.

    Drawing on conversations with the basketmakers from across the country and reproducing many of their documentary photographs, Bell offers an intimate glimpse of their lifeways, motivations, and hopes. Lavish illustrations of every basket convey the humble, tactile beauty of these functional vessels.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSmithsonian American Art Museum
    Release dateOct 1, 2013
    ISBN9781469615295
    A Measure of the Earth: The Cole-Ware Collection of American Baskets
    Author

    Nicholas R. Bell

    Nicholas R. Bell is the Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator of American Craft and Decorative Art at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. His books include 40 under 40: Craft Futures, History in the Making: Renwick Craft Invitational 2011, and A Revolution in Wood: The Bresler Collection.

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      Book preview

      A Measure of the Earth - Nicholas R. Bell

      A MEASURE OF THE EARTH

      A MEASURE OF THE EARTH

      The Cole-Ware Collection of American Baskets

      Nicholas R. Bell

      with a Foreword by Henry Glassie

      Renwick Gallery

      of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

      Distributed by

      University of North Carolina Press

      The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?

      RALPH WALDO EMERSON¹

      A Measure of the Earth:

      The Cole-Ware Collection of American Baskets

      is organized by the Renwick Gallery

      of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

      The James Renwick Alliance and Margot Heckman

      generously support the exhibition.

      Additional support for the

      accompanying exhibition film was provided by

      the National Basketry Organization

      and Wonder Laboratories.

      A MEASURE OF THE EARTH: The Cole-Ware Collection of American Baskets

      Theresa J. Slowik, Chief of Publications

      Tiffany D. Farrell, Editor

      Karen Siatras, Designer

      Gene Young, Photographer

      Smithsonian American Art Museum

      Renwick Gallery

      The Smithsonian American Art Museum is home to one of the largest collections of American art in the world. Its holdings—more than 41,000 works—tell the story of America through the visual arts and represent the most inclusive collection of American art in any museum today. It is the nation’s first federal art collection, predating the 1846 founding of the Smithsonian Institution. The museum celebrates the exceptional creativity of the nation’s artists whose insights into history, society, and the individual reveal the essence of the American experience.

      The Renwick Gallery became the home of the Museum’s American craft and decorative arts program in 1972. The Gallery is located in a historic architectural landmark on Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street, in Washington, D.C. For more information visit the museum’s website at AmericanArt.si.edu.

      First published in 2013 by

      the Smithsonian American Art Museum

      Distributed by

      the University of North Carolina Press

      116 South Boundary Street

      Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27514-3808

      www.uncpress.unc.edu

      1-800-848-6224

      ISBN 978-1-4696-1528-8

      © 2013 Smithsonian American Art Museum All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

      Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, on view at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., from October 4 through December 8, 2013.

      Image credits

      Cover: Richard Krupa, Old Fashioned Egg

      Basket (detail), 1987. See pp. 116–117.

      Page 1: Joe Halasey, Coconut Palm Frond

      Basket (Calabash Style), 2000. See p. 100.

      Pages 2–3: Elijah Dumas, Lidded Gullah Basket (detail), 1991. See p. 88.

      Pages 4–5: Jennifer Heller Zurick separating outer black willow bark from the inner layer used for basketry, 2004

      Pages 6–7: Katherine Lewis, Rope Coil (detail), 2011. See p. 121.

      Pages 68–69: JoAnne Russo, Acorn Basket, #74 (detail), 2003. See p. 155.

      Library of Congress

      Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Smithsonian American Art Museum

      A measure of the earth : the Cole-Ware collection

      of American baskets / Nicholas R. Bell ; with a

      foreword by Henry H. Glassie.

      pages cm

      Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, on view at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., from October 4 through December 8, 2013.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-1-4696-1528-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

      1. Baskets—United States—Exhibitions. 2. Cole, Steven R.—Art collections—Exhibitions. 3. Ware, Martha G.—Art collections—Exhibitions. 4. Baskets—Private collections—Washington (D.C.)—Exhibitions. 5. Smithsonian American Art Museum—Exhibitions. I. Renwick

      Gallery. II. Title.

      NK3649.55.U6S65 2013

      746.41–20973074753—dc23

      2013023092

      Typeset in Old Forge and Langton

      Printed on Munken Lynx by

      Conti Tipocolor in Florence, Italy

      CONTENTS

      Foreword HENRY GLASSIE

      Preface

      On Baskets NICHOLAS R. BELL

      Plates

      Checklist

      Further Reading

      Artist Index

      Photography Credits

      Jamin Uticone riving handle and rim billets from white ash, 2011

      FOREWORD

      HENRY GLASSIE

      One force that shapes our world is the neocolonial commercial expansion called globalization. Its counterforce, ranging from terroristic violence to the pleasure of a meal made at home, has no commonly accepted name. Revival might do, and it certainly fits the actions that yielded the collection presented in this book.

      The general process will come toward clarity when this book’s basketry is aligned with pottery, another craft in which beauty and utility combine. Wide and deep in its reach, contemporary pottery exhibits the varieties of revival. One is the robust revival in which a vital tradition is urged toward excellence and made an emblem of heritage through the retrieval of models from the past. Revivals of the kind are happening today among potters in Japan, China, Korea, Bangladesh, Turkey, Morocco, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, England, Mexico, and Brazil. In the United States, successful revivals of ceramic traditions in Arizona and New Mexico, Georgia and North Carolina have been accompanied and supported by rich scholarly writings. For basketry that pattern has been matched in Japan and, in the United States, among Native Americans (whose baskets, in consequence, proved too expensive for Steve Cole and Martha Ware) and among African Americans whose coiled, sweetgrass baskets feature in their collection.

      Another variety of revival is personal. It happens when elderly people return to the arts of their youth, not for financial reasons but because making things brings them pleasure. In my experience that is often the case with basketmakers. John O. Livingston in Pennsylvania was one, Stan Lamprey in England another. Returning to the craft of the past, they passed the time, tested themselves, and recovered the delight of creation. Again and again, traditions supposed dead come back to life in life’s twilight. It is like that with musicians who played in youth, abandoned music when money had to be earned, and then when the burden of midlife had been lifted, they strung up the old banjo and had at it again. Some of those elderly rural musicians, who played only for their own amazement, were still around when the city kids came looking for them in the days of the folksong revival, at exactly the time when the basketmakers of this book went back to the land. Their motives ran parallel, and, like the young musicians of the folksong revival, some basketmakers found old-timers who could show them a thing or two, but more read books and studied historical examples to figure it out for themselves.

      In figuring it out for themselves, the basketmakers were unlike the young potters of robust revivals who learn within the family or in muddy, rumbling workshops managed by stern masters. With few to guide them, it was harder, but a false view of tradition as rigid and restrictive makes their effort seem more different than it was. Whatever the setting, only so much can be taught. Through trial and error, all masters of craft become self-taught. That is what I was told by great potters—by Agawa Norio in Japan, Mehmet Gürsoy in Turkey, and Antonio Margaritelli in Italy—they learned from old people and old objects, then taught themselves through devoted practice.

      Similar acts and attitudes follow. The basketmakers are committed to the use of native, natural materials. So are the potters; local materials are essential to their art and their oppositional claim to traditionality. The basketmakers are borrowers, adopting ideas from Germany and Japan. All traditions are opportunistically inclusive. The vigorous practice of the potters of the southern United States, built on English and German foundations, has opened to absorb techniques from China, Japan, Korea, and Thailand. The basketmakers are experimental. So are the potters, but here a difference arises. Strong traditions regularly pass through phases of experimentation, but these are followed by recentering, by actions that push them beyond replication while pulling them back from excessive novelty to locate a new coherence of action.

      Darryl Arawjo splitting white oak for basket weaving, 1981

      This book documents a creative moment. Perhaps it documents a developmental phase, an experimental phase of replication and novelty that will be followed by a phase of consolidation, capable of inspiring a new generation to take up the task. At this moment only one of the basketmakers outside of South Carolina is under fifty. They lack followers and place the blame on the culture of the young. But the tradition of Southern pottery has achieved a magnificent recentering in the past two decades, attracting many young men and women into participation.

      Perhaps this collection documents a stage of development, or perhaps it documents a historical moment, now past, when basketmaking, like folk music, was part of an American quest for authenticity. Either way, the Cole-Ware Collection, in its quality, and the fine essay by Nicholas Bell testify to the strength of the counterforce of revival in our time.

      Red Bird Mission, Market Basket (detail), 1996. See p. 145.

      PREFACE

      You’re never going to believe what I just did.

      —STEVEN R. COLE TO MARTHA G. WARE ²

      This exhibition sprouted from a simple question, Would you like to come see my baskets? Steve Cole contacted me in the spring of 2010, when I was just starting work on the Renwick Gallery’s fortieth anniversary exhibition, 40 under 40: Craft Futures, and less than amenable to distraction. I deferred, asking for more information, for pictures, for anything that would postpone the truly minor trouble of going to Arlington, Virginia, to see this man’s collection. Baskets, I thought, flimsy things. How good could they really be? But each time I delayed him, he returned patiently with what I wanted, and slowly it dawned on me that

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