Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art.

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).

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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.

Once fabricated to contain foodstuffs such as rice, cowpeas, and sweet potatoes, as well as tools and valuables, clothing and sewing supplies, the Lowcountry baskets in "Row Upon Row" were appreciated for containing and shaping space itself. The time had passed when women would return from the fields toting baskets of vegetables on their heads and their eager families would peer inside to see what there was to eat (Fig. 3). In the exhibition galleries all eyes shifted to the baskets. Craftsmanship and sensitivity to materials were the qualities that commanded attention. Utility had ceased to be the major arbiter of value. Ingenuity of design and seriousness of artistic purpose were becoming paramount.

"Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art" fills in the African side of the story. (3) It traces the parallel histories of coiled basketry in Africa and the United States, starting from the domestication of rice in West Africa, through the transatlantic slave trade, to the migration of African rice culture to America. It illustrates the vastly under-appreciated transfer of knowledge from Africa to the New World and demonstrates how cultures that have been uprooted and fragmented reconstitute themselves in a new setting. Through the stunning artistry of contemporary basket makers who see themselves as preserving and perpetuating their African heritage, it places a vibrant American artistic culture at the table of the world's significant aesthetic traditions. (4)

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Visitors to "Grass Roots" are greeted with three masterful baskets: a Ginger basket by South Carolina's Mary Jackson, recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Fellowship; an Egg basket by Elizabeth Mazyck, also from South Carolina; and an Isichurno by the late Beauty Ngxongo from South Africa (Figs. 4-6). On both sides of the Atlantic, the art of coiled basketry continues to be passed down from generation to generation. In coastal South Carolina and Georgia, as in many parts of Africa today, basket makers invent forms, experiment with materials, and hone time-honored techniques to create works that are unique and new.

In a wall case next to the three virtuoso baskets hang two winnowing baskets, or fanners, the earliest and most important type of coiled basketry made by Africans in America. From the introduction of rice in the late 1600s well into the twentieth century, fanner baskets were used to separate the rice from its husk. Pounded grains of raw rice were poured into a fanner and thrown in the air, or dropped from one basket to another. The wind blew away the chaff, and the rice was ready for cooking (Figs. 7-8).

Can the origin of the Lowcountry coiled basket be traced to a particular African tradition? Coiled baskets made in Senegal and Angola look remarkably similar to African-American fanner baskets, whereas today in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Cote d'Ivoire, fanners typically are woven rather than coiled (Fig. 9). "Grass Roots" takes the position that it is impossible to specify a single African ethnic group or site of origin for the African-American coiled basket. The preference for one technique over another, coiled rather than woven in this case, is due most likely to the kinds of plant materials available.

Rather than focus on formal resemblances, a better strategy might be to look at the demography of the slave trade to South Carolina. From the founding of the colony in 1670 through the end of the legal trade to North America in 1807, approximately forty percent of all Africans arriving at the port of Charleston were shipped from the region then known as the "Rice Coast" or "Upper Guinea Coast." An equal number came from the Congo and Angola, where people did not grow rice, yet made a wide variety of coiled baskets. Out of the cornucopia of basketry forms and techniques in Africa, one type emerged on Lowcountry rice plantations in response to the physical and economic environment encountered in the New World.

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RICE, BASKETS, AND THE LOWCOUNTRY PLANTATION

Around 3,000 years ago, West African farmers in the floodplains of the inland Niger delta domesticated a species of rice, Oryza glaberrima. Rice became a dietary staple of the great empires of Ghana, Mall, and Songhai during the eleventh to sixteenth centuries AD. Along the coast, African farmers perfected methods of growing rice in marine estuaries, controlling water levels with canals, embankments, gates, and hollowed-out logs (Carney 200l). European traders admired African systems of rice cultivation and stocked their holds with rice to feed their captives. In 1793, for example, Samuel Gamble, captain of the slave ship Sundown, noted in his log that the Baga people in Guinea "are very expert in cultivating rice" (Fig. 10). Geographers described how African farmers grew rice in many different environments and could obtain three crops a year by planting it along tidal rivers, in swamps, and in upland fields.

Africans transported to the Western Hemisphere brought knowledge systems, including technologies for moving fresh water on and off the rice fields and for turning raw rice into an edible food. Geographer Judith Carney asserts that this transfer of knowledge is a vastly under-appreciated aspect of the slave trade and of the economy of the Lowcountry rice plantation. Her chapter in the exhibition catalogue, "Rice in the New World" characterizes the involuntary migration as "an unprecedented exodus of tropical farmers from the Old World to the New" (Rosengarten et al. 2008:99). On the wharves and street corners of Charleston, skilled workers from Africa's rice-growing regions were sold at a premium. Carney notes that when planters stocked their estates with slaves, they wanted the brightest, healthiest, and most adaptable Africans, people who could quickly learn a language, endure hard labor, and help them turn a profit (Fig. 11).

The coiled winnowing tray, or fanner, and the head-tote basket were essential to processing rice, hence were produced by the thousands on hundreds of plantations along the Lowcountry's rice rivers. Soon after commercial rice production ceased, these objects became enshrined as icons of a bygone era. In the 1920s-30s, the figure of a stately woman balancing a basket on her head in African fashion became a central symbol among a group of artists and writers whose work has come to be known as the Charleston Renaissance. Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Elizabeth O'Neill Verner, Anna Heyward Taylor, Alfred Hutty, DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, John Bennett, and others established a cultural scene that can be compared to the Harlem Renaissance in New York City and the Southern Literary Renaissance based in Nashville, Tennessee (Figs. 12-13). Their salons and societies, exhibitions and publications made Charleston a mecca for visiting painters, including Edward Hopper, Childe Hassam, and Andrew Wyeth, and photographers such as Doris Ullman, Bayard Wootten, and Walker Evans.

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CONGO CONNECTIONS

Apart from baskets with clear links to rice production, complex forms in the Lowcountry repertory suggest that aesthetic principles and cultural ideas, along with practical skills and know-how, survived the Middle Passage. Among the earliest known coiled baskets in the American South are stacked "double" and "triple" baskets, some lashed to wooden legs (Fig. 14). "Handicraftsmen" on Lowcountry plantations made tiered sewing baskets that were described in detail by David Doar, the last commercial rice planter on the Santee River in South Carolina. Using "a finer kind of grass, sewed with palmetto or oak strip," basket makers fabricated "three-storied" baskets, "that is, one on top of the other, each resting on the cover of the one below and getting smaller as they went up" (Doar 1936:33-34).

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These stacked forms recall similarly constructed baskets from the Congo. A remarkable Congo basket accessioned by the American Museum of Natural History in 1911 features three smaller cylinders sewn around the circumference of the cover, and a fourth placed at the center (Fig. 15). The arrangement of parts may have cosmological significance--three points on the circle referring to the physical world of the living, and the fourth to the spiritual world of the dead. (6) This mapping of the Kongo cosmos corresponds to the "four moments of the sun" as interpreted by Robert Farris Thompson, an idea expressed in its simplest form as four points around a circumference, a cross, or a cross within a circle. (7)

Alternately, Wyatt MacGaffey describes a "three-zone model, as it were a stack of plates" which stands for "the visible world ... of land and water; the sky, abode of God and the spirits; and the place of the dead" (MacGaffey 1986:46). A three-tiered basket might represent the whole universe of the living and dead, which MacGaffey calls "the spiral universe" (ibid. p. 75). Thus, the coiled basket may be seen as representing the passage of time, a function consistent with the use of basketry to symbolize the cosmos or the social order. The distinctive stepped lids of a Kongo basket known as kinkungu allude, possibly, to BaKongo kings' graves, often built in stepped tiers (10)--a parallel suggested by comparing the form of the kinkungu with a picture of a Libinza grave in Bangala, taken by Frederick Starr in 1906 (Figs. 16-17; Starr 1912:Pl.63). (11)

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Two stacked baskets lashed to wooden legs made before the Civil War--one with a North Carolina provenance and the other from Lancaster County, South Carolina (Fig. 18)--may represent an early link in the hypothetical sequence from the stepped lids of Kongo kinkungu, to double and triple sewing baskets made on Lowcountry plantations, to the contemporary "in and out" basket made in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina (Fig. 19). The latter form is named for the technique of "hauling in" and "playing out" the basket's sides, but also makes a sexual reference, according to Kate Young, an anthropologist whose doctoral dissertation (Day 1983) examined kinship networks in the Mt. Pleasant basket-making community. During the long, hot summer afternoons Young spent sewing baskets in Manigault Corner--an extended family settlement that has been a center of basket pro duction for a hundred years--"women often joked and bragged about their sexuality" and "mentioned the names of certain basket forms representing particular parts of the male and female body." A tall, corrugated basket, with "in and out" sides--the kind that sewers describe as a wastepaper or yarn basket to tourists who stop at the roadside stands where they sell their baskets--was known among themselves as a "beaty basket" "Beaty," Young reports, "is the Gullah word for penis." (13)

Lowcountry basket makers explain the triple sewing basket in strictly functional terms: the bottom compartment holds fabric scraps, the middle thread, and the top needles, pins, and buttons. Yet a shape or a number system that embodies an idea may endure and be put to new uses after the original idea is forgotten. The cosmogram that inspired stepped lids on baskets in the Lower Congo is unknown to the Mt. Pleasant basket makers who make "double" and "triple" baskets, yet these shapes may replicate the three- and four-tiered kinkungu. Perhaps it is not coincidental that the numbers three and four, which recur in Kongo diagrams of the universe, also appear in Mt. Pleasant, in the grouping of rows of pine straw to make bands of color on the sides of a basket.

RITUALS OF RICE

In Africa, rice was a core element of complex cultural systems that had evolved over centuries, in contrast to the rapidly organized slave plantation societies that emerged in semitropical America. African rituals of rice included masquerades and sculpture, harvest celebrations, and gifts to commemorate important life passages. "Grass Roots" features sculpture related to rituals of rice in four cultures: Dan, Baga, Bamana, and Mende. These sculptural objects are of special interest to the South Carolina basket makers who are well aware of the connection between baskets and rice, but not of these other cultural links. The exhibit objects include five circa fifteenth century nomoli figures, found in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Similar ones are used by the Mende in shrines and in rice fields to ensure a good harvest (Fig. 20). A figurative Dan hoe, Dan rice spoons, and Bamana chi'wara headdresses, also on display, show the deep connections between West African art and rituals of rice (Fig. 21). The Baga are represented with a Baga drum, an a-Tshol shrine figure, a female bust headdress (zigiren-wonde), and several objects related to rice--including a series of nested rice measuring baskets and a fine marriage basket lent by Frederick Lamp, who writes:

In the traditional wedding ceremony practiced before mid-century the bride (wu-fura) was expected to perform a dance, the do-fura, in which she carried on her head a basket called ta-fala te ka-leka, a spherical bowl atop a conical stem, rather like a wine glass. As she danced, which she did every day for a week, gifts of money from men and women onlookers were thrown into this basket, mingling with the rice grains tossed by the other women (Lamp 1996:124).

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MISSIONS AND MARKETS

In the late nineteenth century, the transformation of the Lowcountry basket into a source of income for the basket makers parallels what happened in parts of Africa, particularly southern Africa, where tourists and collectors began to purchase baskets as souvenirs and examples of local and exotic handicraft.

For nearly eighty years following the Civil War, African-American farmers in the Charleston area carried vegetables and fruit to city markets in coiled bulrush baskets balanced on the head. So striking was this phenomenon that a genre of street vendor photography emerged in the early 1900s, notably in the work of George W. Johnson. Tourists sent home postcards with images of vegetable vendors carrying produce in head-tote baskets. What was a common way of transporting goods in Africa became a symbol of African-American life in the post-plantation South.

Christian missionaries had come south after the war to start schools for freed people. At Penn School on St. Helena Island, bulrush basket making became a regular part of the curriculum. Teaching boys to make "Native Island Basketry" was seen as a way to help farm families earn money and stay on the land (Fig. 22). Penn School targeted buyers across the country, especially among the school's supporters in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Promotional materials noted Penn's intention to preserve a craft with African roots. Basket making, said the Annual Report of 1910, "was brought from Africa in the early slave days." In the 1920s, teachers from forty-six African mission stations visited St. Helena. Calling the island "a laboratory, a demonstration of the strongest and best of the great sweeping currents of the world's life," one visitor declared her ambition to copy the Penn experiment in Angola (Penn Normal, Industrial, and Agricultural School n.d.).

Penn's connection to Africa was direct. Alfred Graham, the school's first basketry instructor, learned the craft from his African-born father. Graham in turn taught his grandnephew, George Browne, who ran the basket shop from 1916 until 1950. "Grass Roots" includes a video interview with Leroy Browne, George's son, recorded in 2006, just six months before his death. Enriched with photographs taken by Leigh Richmond Miner in the first decades of the twentieth century, the story of Penn School and its role in the preservation of basket making is a lesson in cultural self-defense and artistic creation. As job opportunities generated by World War I lured tens of thousands of rural black southerners to the northern states, Lowcountry baskets could have gone the way of gourd and earthenware vessels, wooden mortars and pestles, palmetto fans and thatching. The bulrush "work" basket, once essential to rice production and customarily made by men, almost disappeared. (16)

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Penn's basketry department, inspired by educators from outside the community, self-consciously sought to preserve an old tradition. At the same time, seventy miles to the north across the Cooper River from Charleston, a community-based, market-driven, forward-looking, and decidedly entrepreneurial movement was underway. Basket makers in the vicinity of Mt. Pleasant, working with a finer and more flexible material called sweetgrass, seized opportunities offered by retail merchants and a budding tourist trade to increase their output and expand their repertory.

Around 1916, Charleston merchant Clarence W. Legerton began to commission baskets from sewers who lived near Mr. Pleasant and sell them at his stationery store on King Street and through a mail order catalog. Acting as agent for the basket makers, community elder Sam Coakley would relay orders for baskets, and every other Saturday sewers would bring their wares to his house. Under Legerton's patronage, basket makers earned a reliable, if exceedingly modest, income. People who had never made baskets before, or who used to sew them but had stopped, were encouraged to learn from one of the older practitioners.

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With the completion of the Cooper River Bridge in 1929 and the paving of Highway 17, the major coastal artery that passes through Charleston, basket makers began hanging their work on roadside stands (Fig. 23). Freed from middlemen, sewers could charge the retail price for their baskets. Using sweetgrass (Muhlenbergia sericea) bound with strips of palmetto leaf (Sabal palmetto), they produced an ever broader range of forms. To provide color contrast, they laid longleaf pine needles (Pinus palustris) on the outside of their rows, and for textural accents tied the needles in knots.

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For sixty years, sweetgrass baskets provided a source of income for scores of families whose economic opportunities were limited to poorly paid, menial jobs. In the 1960s, basket makers began selling their wares downtown, in the Charleston Market, as well as from basket stands on the highway. In the 1970s-80s, enterprising sewers branched out and began taking their baskets to crafts fairs across the region. Then, on September 21, 1989, Hurricane Hugo struck the Lowcountry, laying waste to coastal settlements and knocking down the basket stands that had been fixtures on the roadside for half a century. While the stands were easily rebuilt, the storm had the effect of clearing the way for real estate development. Once a quiet village, Mt. Pleasant is now a boom town. Condominiums, office complexes, and shopping malls are busily swallowing fields and woodlands. Resorts and subdivisions are steadily destroying sweetgrass habitats or cutting off access to basket-making materials. Each year basket makers have to travel farther to Georgia or northern Florida to gather the grass.

Sharing common problems, such as finding the materials to make their baskets, securing safe, conspicuous places to sell their work, and staving off new roads and gated subdivisions that encroach on their settlements, basket makers have organized advocacy groups. Founded in 2003, the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival Association has become the most prominent of these and has served as a full partner in the production of "Grass Roots." To protect the habitat that sustains sweetgrass and bulrush and the culture that identifies with coiled basketry, local leaders and the National Park Service have pushed successfully for federal recognition of the Gullah/ Geechee Heritage Area. A bill passed in October 2006 establishes a corridor through North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida that coincides with the historic range of the coiled basket and the old Lowcountry Rice Kingdom.

AFRICAN PARALLELS

"Grass Roots" brings the African, as well as the African-American, story into the present. The final section of the exhibition compares contemporary examples from western and southern Africa with the trajectory of change in the Lowcountry (Figs. 24-27). In many parts of Africa, while methods and forms are time-honored and stable, materials can be new and changing. African basket makers adapt to the scarcity of natural materials, or in some cases show preferences for innovation, by incorporating new materials into their work. In Senegal and The Gambia, for example, plastic strips from a nearby mat factory or unraveled synthetic threads from imported flour, onion, and rice bags are used to bind rows of grass in coiled baskets. Fula women from Senegal to Chad continue to make flat trays, traditionally used as calabash covers or wall decorations, but introduce synthetic fibers, beads, and trinkets into the classic forms. In the cities of South Africa, baskets are now made with no natural fiber at all; fabulous multicolored platters are fashioned from copper and plastic-coated telephone wire. New versions of traditional forms such as lids for ceramic beer pots look very different adorned with brightly colored beads, wire, metal, or synthetic fiber.

In South Africa, as in the American South, the most talented basket makers sell their works to collectors, who prize them as art objects. Basketry cooperatives connect local communities to distant markets. Through formal instruction and informal example, expert basket makers teach the ancient craft to young people and to rural women whose husbands have gone to work in the cities. In contrast to the African practice of incorporating color, geometric designs, and new materials and synthetics into traditional forms, Lowcountry basket makers prefer natural materials and see the well-being of the environment as integral to the continuation of their art.

The varying African and African-American approaches to dealing with the scarcity of traditional materials, and to meeting the different demands of collectors who buy the work, reflect both deeply held principles of basket design and construction, and local responses to economic conditions. Mary Jackson's "Two-Lips Basket," a named, limited edition conceived as a work of art, and popular items such as basketry jewelry, Christmas bells and ornaments, and the latest innovation--the "wave" basket-are examples of a playful and serious inventiveness.

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In The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts John Michael Vlach suggested that the search for the Lowcountry basket's African origins had scarcely begun and would not be easy. He was right. One lesson of "Grass Roots" is that likeness does not constitute proof of lineage. Another lesson is that looking too hard for similarities can blind us to the full range of forms within a tradition and to the "Africanness" of the South Carolina basket, which consists less of an identity of shapes than of ideas of what makes a good and beautiful basket, as well as beliefs about where the baskets came from. While made in America by people whose families have lived here for many generations, the Lowcountry basket retains ties to Africa because its makers see themselves as the heirs of people who came from Africa and brought the knowledge of how to make the basket with them. They see the basket as an African gift to American life.

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References Cited

Arment, David, and Marisa Fick-Jordan; photos by Andrew Cerino. 2004. Wired: Contemporary Zulu Telephone-Wire Baskets. Santa Fe, NM: S/C Editions.

Carney, Judith. 2001. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Cunningham, Anthony B., and Elizabeth M. Terry. 2006. African Basketry: Grassmots Art From Southern Africa. Cape Town: Fernwood Press.

Day, Kay Young [Kate Porter Young]. 1983. My Family Is Me: Women's Kin Networks and Social Power in a Black

Sea Island Community. PhD diss., Rutgers University.

Doar, David. 1936. Rice and Rice Planting in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Contributions from the Charleston Museum no. 8. Charleston, SC: Charleston Museum..

Lamp, Frederick John. 1996. Art of the Baga: A Drama of Cultural Reinvention. New York: Museum for African Art and Prestel.

MacGaffey, Wyatt. 1986. Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Monteiro, Joachim John. 1968. Angola and the River Congo, vol. 2. London: Frank Cass. Work originally published 1875.

Penn Normal, Industrial, and Agricultural School. n.d. [ca. 1927]. What Some of Them Said of It. Pamphlet. Edith M. Dabbs papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina.

Rosengarten, Dale. 1984. Row Upon Row: Sea Grass Baskets of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Columbia, South Carolina: McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina.

--. 1997. Social Origins of the African-American Lowcountry Basket. Ph.D. diss. Harvard University.

Rosengarten, Dale, Theodore Rosengarten, and Enid Schildkrout, eds. 2008. Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art. New York: Museum for African Art.

Silva, Sonia. 2003. Vez Dos Cestos/Time For Baskets. Lisbon: Museu Nacional de Etnologia.

Starr, Frederick. 1912. Congo Natives: An Ethnographic Album. Chicago: Lakeside Press.

Vlach, John Michael. 1978. The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art.

Schildkrout, Enid. 1998. "Personal Styles and Disciplinary Paradigms: Frederick Starr and Herbert Lang in the Congo." In The Scramble for Art in Central Africa, ed. E. Schildkrout and C. Keim, pp. 169-92. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sieber, Roy. 1972. African Textiles and Decorative Arts. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

--.1980. African Furniture and Household Objects. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Sweeney, James Johnson. 1935. African Negro Art. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.

Thompson, Robert Farris. 1983. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House.

Notes

(1) Much of Frederick's Starr's African collection was purchased by the American Museum of Natural History (see Schildkrout 1998).

(2) Dale Rosengarten curated "Row Upon Row" for the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina. The exhibition explored the history of the African-American coiled basket and featured the work of many South Carolina basket makers. It toured for more than twenty years and the accompanying catalogue is still in print and widely consulted.

(3) "Grass Roots" contains more than 200 objects, 5 original videos, as well as archival and current photography. Exhibit objects include baskets made in Africa and the American South, West African sculptures from cultures that had a connection to rice, and paintings and drawings from the Charleston Renaissance period. The videos, and a half-hour documentary that has already been shown on South Carolina Educational Television, were made by filmmaker Dana Sardet. They bring the voices of basket makers into the exhibition and reflect the close involvement of the basket-making community with the project. The 270-page full-color catalogue, with essays by editors Enid Schildkrout, Dale Rosengarten, and Theodore Rosengarten and scholars Judith A. Carney, Jessica B. Harris, Sandra Klopper, J. Lorand Matory, Fath Davis Ruffins, John Michael Vlach, and Peter H. Wood, explores Africa's impact on America through the prism of the coiled basket, the oldest continuous African-American art.

(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.

DALE ROSENGARTEN is a historian and curator in Special Collections at the College of Charleston Library. Her exhibitions and publications include Row upon Row: Sea Grass Baskets of the South Carolina Lowcountry (1986) and "A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life."

THEODORE ROSENGARTEN is an independent scholar, teacher, and writer with interests in Southern history, race relations, and the Holocaust. His publications include All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (1974) and Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter (1986). He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lyndhurst Prize.

ENID SCHILDKROUT is chief curator and director of exhibitions and publications at the Museum for African Art and curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History. Her exhibitions and publications include "African Reflections: Art from Northeast Zaire" (1990) and "Body Art: Marks of Identity" (2000) at the American Museum of Natural History.