By Native Hands exhibition

BY NATIVE HANDS
Native American Baskets from the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art

August 30 - November 11, 2007

This exhibition features sixty-four Native American baskets from the collection of the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel, Mississippi. These baskets represent native weaving traditions from the entire North American continent, from the Arctic to the American Southwest. Basketry originated as a utilitarian craft, but from the beginning, weavers have produced baskets expressive of both tribal and personal aesthetics. Some simple baskets are an example of form following function, which is also the basic tenet of modernist design and architecture. Simple lines, fine technique, and strong forms make bowls and baskets for storage, gathering, carrying, and cooking into objects of visual pleasure. The fancier baskets, made for beauty or ritual, were based on utilitarian forms but were never intended for daily use. In these objects, everyday forms, materials and techniques are transformed to produce artworks with a primarily aesthetic function. However, even baskets made for beauty served a purpose, whether they were for ceremony, gift, to mark the owner's status, or to be traded as a livelihood.

These sixty-four baskets were for the most part collected by Catherine Marshall Gardiner, the aunt of Lauren Rogers, who donated her vast collection of Native American baskets to the Museum upon its founding in 1923. Mrs. Gardiner sought to gather an example of every type of basket produced by every basket-making tribe in North America. Several decades of intense collecting yielded one of the most thoroughly representative basketry collections in the American Southeast. Some newer baskets have been added over the decades, but Mrs. Gardiner's vision for the collection - a representative selection of the very best of Native American basketry - remains the foundation of the collection.