Coastal Sweetgrass: Clay & Land & Craft

COASTAL SWEETGRASS

CURATED BY CHOTSANI ELAINE DEAN

COASTAL SWEETGRASS

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Manufactured in the United States

First edition, 2023

International Standard Book Number 978-1-932706-66-6

Unless otherwise noted, all dimensions in inches: height precedes width precedes depth.

ESSAY BY CHOTSANI ELAINE DEAN

& LAND & CRAFT

My relationship with sweetgrass baskets and Gullah culture began in 2010 with the traveling exhibition Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., organized and sponsored by the Museum for African Art in New York in cooperation with the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston, the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina, and the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival Association.

This was my first time seeing sweetgrass baskets and learning of this particular craft tradition’s cultural and historical significance in the American South. The origins of Gullah sweetgrass baskets can be traced back to West Africa, particularly the rice-growing regions of Sierra Leone and Angola. During the era of chattel enslavement, countless enslaved Africans were brought to South Carolina, also referred to as the Lowcountry. The work and makers in the exhibition and curation touched me deeply and powerfully; the sweetgrass baskets and the Gullah/Geechee people were etched into my mind, and I felt a deep connection. Although I am not Gullah, I understood and gained richly from the relationships this exhibition revealed between various craft traditions of the continent of Africa and what the enslaved people were making in America. Craft traditions with knowledge and skills survived the transatlantic slave trade, also known as the Middle Passage. Because I, too, am a descendant of enslaved Africans brought to America via the transatlantic slave trade, this is an essential part of my history as an artist and educator.

Residing in the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia, the Gullah people have a rich cultural heritage and identity that has remained preserved through generations. One of the most essential and recognizable aspects of Gullah culture is the sweetgrass basket. Creating a Gullah sweetgrass basket is a meticulous process demanding skill, precision, labor, discipline, and a total commitment to patience. This tradition is passed down from

the maternal side of the family, the elder women teaching the younger women to ensure the preservation and distinct identity of the Gullah sweetgrass basket tradition. Sweetgrass is a grass with long, durable fibers, which is harvested and dried before it is used to make a basket. The processes used to make a sweetgrass basket include splitting the sweetgrass, coiling it, sewing it, and shaping it with the incorporation of pine needles, creating diverse patterns and designs. Each basket maker strives to create their own signature style within the tradition, as seen in the pairing of sweetgrass baskets by Cayetano-Jefferson and ceramic works using sweetgrass basket-making techniques by Pope in this exhibition.

Despite the powerful legacy of Gullah sweetgrass basketry, the makers have had and continue to face numerous challenges. Gentrification, the encroachment of modern development, the continued widening and expansion of Highway 17, and property transfers from families with longstanding relationships with sweetgrass basket makers have created limited and diminished access to land resources where the materials to make sweetgrass baskets grow. Cayetano-Jefferson and Pope are two contemporary artists working within craft traditions whose creative practices reflect and preserve the resilience and cultural heritage of the Gullah people.

This exhibition centers and celebrates two Gullah makers working in different mediums, but with similar aesthetic criteria geared to carry the sweetgrass basket tradition into the realm of contemporary craft and art—simultaneously forging their own paths as individual artists. CayetanoJefferson’s and Pope’s works bring knowledge and visual language that permeate the realm of visual arts, holding and communicating the story of their cultural heritage and identity so that we may honor the Gullah community and recognize the importance of cultural diversity and heritage preservation so that it is not lost.

“For the next generation, the traffic that brought customers was a harbinger of change. People have adapted to a faster pace of life and a money economy, first by working at jobs in homes, hospitals, hotels, restaurants, and public schools, and more recently, by branching out into other professions and callings. Once a quiet village, Mt. Pleasant is now a Sun Belt mecca. Shopping malls, office complexes, and condominiums 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.” Johnson, Nathaniel, Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art, Museum for African Art, New York, 2008.

While teaching at the South Carolina School of the Arts at Anderson University in South Carolina, I taught a course centered on craft. During this time, sweetgrass baskets and the Gullah/Geechee people activated the memory of the aforementioned exhibition into a reality I could experience and apply directly in my teaching. Initially, I began planning a broad and global craft traditions curriculum. It became apparent quickly that this was too ambitious and not manageable in one semester for students to have a meaningful learning experience with craft. I realized it was essential to focus on the core components that define craft: the use of locally sourced materials, traditional techniques, sustainable practices, and most importantly, the craftspeople and their culture. As craft is shaped by place, people, and material, I decided to focus on the craft traditions of South Carolina so that students would have a direct relationship and context of people, place, history, and material. My students and I would start with the craft traditions and histories of South Carolina and travel into and around the world, comparing and contrasting traditions, materials, geographical realities, culture, and processes. During this course, I was guided and helped by connections and relationships in my university community and South Carolina that planted the seeds of this exhibition years later.

During the sweetgrass basket section of the course, one of my students asked if we could take a field trip to see the place and meet the women of the sweetgrass basket tradition, to which I replied, “Why not? That is a great idea! It is only a 3-hour drive”. Not only had this student made this suggestion, she had already researched and decided on the ideal field trip: a tour and sweetgrass basket workshop

with Queen Quet, the elected Chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation. Despite this mid-semester student request for a spontaneous field trip, I was intent on making this trip happen. I asked a colleague, Chad Treado, who worked in the Center for Innovation and Digital Design, what he thought of this idea, as he guided me in the instructional design of this course. To my surprise, he knew a sweetgrass basket maker, so he was immediately invested in supporting this field trip to Charleston, also known as the Lowcountry. Chad’s wife, Bonnie Treado, worked in the Mt. Pleasant area in the healthcare field and formed strong relationships within the Gullah community. The Treado’s formed a friendship in this community with Andrea CayetanoJefferson, a sweetgrass basket maker from Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. With my department’s approval of financial support, it was possible for students to go on this field trip. This went on to be an annual trip for this course and also established the path for Queen Quet, Chieftess of the Gullah/ Geechee Nation, to come to campus to give her histo-musical performance with sponsorship from the Diversity Office and Student Development, partnering with the Department of Art. On the first trip, we visited essential landmarks in Gullah history with Queen Quet. Then, the students attended an interactive workshop on sweetgrass basketmaking at their public library. The next year, the trip expanded to an overnight trip that included attending the annual Coastal Cultures Conference and visiting the Charleston home and workshop of Phillip Simmons, a nationally-recognized African American blacksmith who received the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1982. It was a full experience in which the students could experience a place in relationship to craft, history, and culture of people.

In 2018, the Treados connected me with Andrea Cayetano-Jefferson, a sweetgrass basket maker from Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. CayetanoJefferson and I began coordinating a time for an interview. I interviewed Andrea in 2019 at The Historic Charleston City Market where she sold her baskets. I recorded this interview for the craft class I was teaching; at this time, the course was entirely online. This interview was a significant part of the curriculum as the students had a sweetgrass basket maker to connect with and not only see the work, but listen to her tell the story of her people. Not too long after this, I received approval from the university president to commission a basket made by Cayetano-Jefferson for the university art

collection and an invitation for a solo exhibition in the Vandiver Gallery at Anderson University. Once I moved to Minnesota, I told Cayetano-Jefferson to be ready to come north to Minnesota.

Fast forward to 2020: I was working as co-author of the book Contemporary Black American Ceramic Artists with donald a clark. This is when I became familiar with the work of Ashlyn Pope. Pope is an artist who works with clay and also works in textiles as she has a background in fashion design. While creating Ashlyn’s profile for the book, I learned that she is Gullah. However, she did not grow up in the South in a Gullah community, as her grandmother moved her family north to New Jersey. Because the tradition of sweetgrass basket making is passed on exclusively from the maternal side of a Gullah family, Pope did not have a way of learning how to make a sweetgrass basket. However, the call and necessity to connect with cultural identity is powerful. Pope creates vessels that speak directly to, and simulate the process and materials used in, sweetgrass baskets. Pope rolls very thin coils of clay that echo the coiled and sewn sweetgrass and pine needles of Gullah sweetgrass baskets in her clay vessels. These coiled elements serve as the foot of her forms. She is signaling to us visually that it is culture, her Gullah culture, that supports the form and her identity.

This exhibition also raises the questions that arise when choosing the value of craft over massproduced items or, more specifically, objects that do not reflect or include the craftspeople integral to the formation of our culture or made by individual makers. Craft traditions reveal to us the notion that it is not only possible, but valuable, for future generations to form healthy connections to their historical and ethnic origins. Although working in different mediums with the overlap of a traditional process, Cayetano-Jefferson’s and Pope’s works in this exhibition share cultural and material identity valuable to our present-day culture of contemporary craft and art. The work they create, and the materials they employ, hold and elevate the significance of their craft tradition, human connection, sustainability issues, cultural preservation, and the impact on local and historical economies. In this exhibition we have the opportunity to connect, outside of the overstimulating marketplace of mass-produced objects, with the works Cayetano-Jefferson and Pope: two artists whose works provide a visual dynamic that speaks to the more profound philosophical implications of our historical record, consumer choices, and cultural capital. This

exhibition equips us to engage with thoughtful and meaningful approaches to the crafts and the spectrum of visual arts to which we assign value and attention, while also preserving the historical and continuing archive of the marketplace, galleries, museums, our homes, and most importantly, education.

Andrea Cayetano-Jefferson

Charleston-based Andrea Cayetano-Jefferson proudly represents the rich Gullah culture through her peerless creations as a sixth-generation sweetgrass basket artist. As a child, she studied the intricacies of basket sewing from her mother and aunt to whom she attributes her commitment to continuing the traditional art form honoring her Gullah ancestors and history.

As a 21st century Gullah, Cayetano-Jefferson is committed to keeping the legacy of her ancestors alive through education. In 2021, she was accepted into the Folklife & Traditional Arts Apprenticeship with her daughter Chelsea and was featured in the 2020 Vandiver Gallery Exhibition at Anderson University (South Carolina). She has been creating baskets for more than 35 years and began working at the renowned Charleston City Market at just eight years old helping to sell her family’s baskets and educating visitors to the Holy City. As an adult, she returned to Charleston and renewed her love and commitment to continuing and teaching the noted Gullah art of sweetgrass basket sewing.

Ashlyn Pope

Ashlyn Pope is an African American sculptural artist of Gullah descent working with ceramics and textiles. Her material choices stem from the traditional works of her ancestors and the influences African art has had on those traditions. She interprets her understanding of the female figure in her work and uses the form to discuss the history of object and ownership of the Black body. The political climate influences her drive to represent mental and physical confinement, restriction, and limitation of the Black body throughout American history and the hope and vision to realize a different future. Pope received her BFA from Kennesaw State University (Georgia) in ceramics and printmaking and her MFA in ceramics from Penn State University (State College) in 2019. Pope is currently an assistant professor at Coastal Carolina University (Myrtle Beach, South Carolina).

Andrea Cayetano-Jefferson

Left to Right:

Covered Basket, 2022, Palmetto, sweetgrass, pine needle, 4 x 7.5 x 7.5

Aiden, 2022, Sweetgrass, bulrush, palmetto, 14 x 15 x 15

Bread Basket, 2023, Palmetto, sweetgrass, bulrush, pine needle, 10.5 x 10.5 x 2.75

Stand Basket, 2023, Sweetgrass, bulrush, pine needle, palmetto, 6.75 x 10 x 10

Untitled, 2023, Bulrush, palmetto, 14 x 10 x 1.5

Shades of Bulrush, 2023, Sweetgrass, bulrush, palmetto, 10.5 x 10.5 x 2.25

Bread Basket with Love Knots, 2023, Sweetgrass, bulrush, pine needle, palmetto, 10.5 x 10.5 x 2.75

Andrea Cayetano-Jefferson

Left to Right: Bowl, 2023, Sweetgrass, bulrush, pine needle, palmetto, 11 x 11 x 3.5 Wrapped Basket, 2023, Sweetgrass, bulrush, pine needle, palmetto, 10 x 10 x 3 Goddess Bowl, 2023, Sweetgrass, bulrush, pine needle, palmetto, 13 x 13 x 3.5 Wall Piece, 2023, Sweetgrass, bulrush, pine needle, 20 x 17.25 x 1

Wrapped Basket, 2023, Sweetgrass, bulrush, pine needle, palmetto, 10.25 x 10.25 x 3

Ashlyn Pope

Left to Right:

Untitled, 2021, Brown stoneware, black underglaze, 9.25 x 5.5 x 5.5

Untitled, 2021, Brown stoneware, black underglaze, 10 x 5 x 5

Andrea Cayetano-Jefferson

Left to Right: Palmetto, Bulrush, Sweetgrass, Pine Needle

Ashlyn Pope

to

Untitled, 2022, Brown stoneware, slip, underglaze, 3.75 x 3.75 x 3.75

Untitled, 2022, Brown stoneware, slip, underglaze, 3.75 x 5 x 3.5

Untitled, 2023, Brown stoneware, slip, underglaze, 5.75 x 4.5 x 4.5

Untitled, 2021, Brown stoneware, gold luster, 12 x 10 x 8

Left

Right, Top to Bottom:

Ashlyn Pope

Left to Right:

Untitled, 2022, Brown stoneware, slip, 3.25 x 4 x 4

Untitled, 2022, Brown stoneware, slip, gold luster, 4.5 x 5 x 3.75

Untitled, 2022, Brown stoneware, slip, gold luster, 4 x 5.5 x 5.5

Ashlyn Pope Black Joy, 2023, Brown stoneware, slip, underglaze, 8 x 6.5 x 3.75

Andrea Cayetano-Jefferson Crowned Stand, 2023, Palmetto, sweetgrass, bulrush, pine needle, 6.75 x 9 x 9.25

NORTHERN CLAY CENTER

Northern Clay Center’s mission is to advance the ceramic arts for artists, learners, and the community, through education, exhibitions, and artist services. Its goals are to create and promote high-quality, relevant, and participatory ceramic arts educational experiences; cultivate and challenge ceramic arts audiences through extraordinary exhibitions and programming; support ceramic artists in the expansion of their artistic and professional skills; embrace makers from diverse cultures and experiences in order to create a more inclusive clay community; and excel as a non-profit arts organization.

Exhibition Staff

Kyle Rudy-Kohlhepp, Executive Director

Tippy Maurant, Deputy Director/Director of Galleries & Exhibitions

Maria Hennen, Galleries Coordinator

Board of Directors

Paul Vahle, Board Chair

Bryan Anderson

Mary K. Baumann

Heather Nameth Bren

Evelyn Weil Browne

Nettie Colón

Sydney Crowder

Haweya Farah

Patrick Kennedy

Mark Lellman

Kate Maury

Brad Meier

Philip Mische

Debbie Schumer

Rick Scott

Cristin McKnight Sethi

Honorary Directors

Kay Erickson

Legacy Directors

Andy Boss

Warren MacKenzie

Joan Mondale

Curator and essayist: Chotsani Elaine Dean

Photographer: Peter Lee

Design: Joseph D.R. OLeary (vetodesign.com)