A basket is a container that is traditionally constructed from stiff fibers, and can be made from a range of materials, including wood splints, runners, and cane. While most baskets are made from plant materials, other materials such as horsehair, baleen, or metal wire can be used. Baskets are generally woven by hand. Some baskets are fitted with a lid, while others are left open on top.
Basket weaving is the process of weaving or sewing pliable materials into three-dimensional artifacts, such as baskets, mats, mesh bags or even furniture. Craftspeople and artists specialized in making baskets may be known as basket makers and basket weavers. Basket weaving is also a rural craft.
Lucy Parker Telles was a Mono Lake Paiute - Kucadikadi and Southern Sierra Miwok Native American basket weaver.
Nora Naranjo Morse is a Native American artist and poet. She currently resides in Española, New Mexico just north of Santa Fe and is a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo, part of the Tewa people. Her work can be found in several museum collections including the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minnesota, and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, where her hand-built sculpture piece, Always Becoming, was selected from more than 55 entries submitted by Native artists as the winner of an outdoor sculpture competition held in 2005. In 2014, she was honored with a NACF Artist Fellowship for Visual Arts and was selected to prepare temporal public art for the 5x5 Project by curator Lance Fung.
The visual arts of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas encompasses the visual artistic practices of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas from ancient times to the present. These include works from South America and North America, which includes Central America and Greenland. The Siberian Yupiit, who have great cultural overlap with Native Alaskan Yupiit, are also included.
Mavis Doering was a Cherokee Nation basketmaker from Oklahoma.
Kelly Jean Church is a black ash basket maker, Woodlands style painter, birchbark biter, and educator.
The Match-e-be-nash-she-wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians of Michigan is a federally recognized tribe of Potawatomi people in Michigan named for a 19th-century Ojibwe chief. They were formerly known as the Gun Lake Band of Grand River Ottawa Indians, the United Nation of Chippewa, Ottawa and Pottawatomi Indians of Michigan, Inc., and the Gun Lake Tribe or Gun Lake Band. They are headquartered in Bradley, Michigan.
Carrie McGowan Bethel (1898–1974) was a Mono Lake Paiute – Kucadikadi basketmaker associated with Yosemite National Park. She was born Carrie McGowan in Lee Vining, California, and began making baskets at age twelve. She participated in basket-making competitions in the Yosemite Indian Field Days in 1926 and 1929. She gave basket weaving demonstrations at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition.
Shan Goshorn was an Eastern Band Cherokee artist, who lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her interdisciplinary artwork expresses human rights issues, especially those that affect Native American people today. Goshorn used different media to convey her message, including woven paper baskets, silversmithing, painting, and photography. She is best known for her baskets with Cherokee designs woven with archival paper reproductions of documents, maps, treaties, photographs and other materials that convey both the challenges and triumphs that Native Americans have experienced in the past and are still experiencing today.
Mary Kawennatakie Adams was a Canadian Mohawk First Nations textile artist and basket maker.
Iva Casuse Honwynum is a Hopi/Navajo artist, social activist, and cultural practitioner. A Native American, Honwynum is best known for her woven baskets and figurative sculpture. Honwynum's most important breakthrough was the development of the pootsaya basket, called "a rare innovation in Hopi basketry". She developed the pootsaya during her 2014 residency at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, having been awarded the Eric and Barbara Dookin Artist Fellowship.
Lisa Telford is a Git'ans Git'anee Haida weaver who creates contemporary garments, shoes and other objects using Northwest Coast style weaving techniques. Her work serves as a commentary on Native identity, stereotypes and fashion.
Mary Leaf (1925–2004) was an Akwesasne Mohawk basket maker, who lived on the border between Canada and the United States. Leaf specialized in basket making, having learned customary basketry techniques from her mother. Her work can be found in the collections of the Newark Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian.
Pat Courtney Gold was a Wasco Native fiber artist and basket weaver from the Columbia River area of Oregon. She graduated with a BA in mathematics and physics from Whitman College and worked as a mathematician-computer specialist before beginning her career in basket weaving. Gold harvested traditional plant fibers to use in her work, including dogbane, cattail, sedge grass, red cedar bark and tree roots. Her pieces often reflected the natural world along the Columbia River, mixing traditional motifs such as condors and sturgeon with contemporary elements like airplanes. Gold also became an environmental and cultural educator, helping to spread knowledge of her ancestral heritage and basketry skills.
Mary Holiday Black was a Navajo basket maker and textile weaver from Halchita, Utah. During the 1970s, in response to a long-term decline in Navajo basketry, Black played a key role in the revival of Navajo basket weaving by experimenting with new designs and techniques, pioneering a new style of Navajo baskets known as "story baskets."
Yvonne Walker Keshick is an Anishinaabe quillwork artist and basket maker.
Susan Billy is a Native American Pomo basket weaver from the Hopland Band Pomo Indians of Northern California.
Joanna E. Schanz is an American basket weaver. She is credited with reviving the Amana arts of broom making and basket weaving. She wrote Willow Basketry of the Amana Colonies in 1986, in honor of Philip Dickel, who taught her how to make baskets. She won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Basketry Organization and one of her willow baskets is held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Edith Bondie (1918-2005) was a basketmaker whose work is in the Smithsonian Institution, the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, and the Besser Museum for Northeast Michigan.
