Indian Basketmakers of California and the Great Basin [SOLD]

From the inside cover:

Since the early 1980s, basket making in California and the Great Basin has undergone a small but significant revival among Native American tribes that historically have produced some of the finest baskets across the land.

This book documents the revival by presenting the work of some of its leading ractitioners. Collector Larry Dalrymple appreciatively rofiles the elders who sustain the traditional practices of this oldest craft form while introducing us to a generation of emerging weavers who are just finding their way into the tradition.

The deep feeling of connection sustains today's weavers who are closely linked to nature and its harvest, a timeless sequence of awareness shared by basketmakers for some eight thousand years. For most weavers, the painstaking work of collecting and preparing materials and designing and weaving baskets is done prayerfully and joyfully, a practice and commitment to tradition that joins their lives in a seamless interweave.

Dalrymple began collecting contemporary Indian baskets in 1978 when the great revival period of basket making and museum collecting had ended and the efforts of contemporary weavers where going largely unnoticed by anthropologists and collectors alike. His interest developed into a twenty-year search for the weavers still active in the region who traced the unbroken line of tradition. His pursuit of exceptional basketry was merged early on with an abiding respect for the weavers, the passion they bring to their work and the argument the work makes for the preservation of the art. We meet and feel we come to know the mostly women artists whose ancestors' baskets reach out to us from the past but whose identities were largely unknown and unsought. Here are the great artists whose passing marks the end of an era: Nettie McKinnon, Ella Johnson, Florence Harrie, Clara Harris, Ida Bishop, Elizabeth Sherman, Lorena Thomas, and others. We are introduced, as well, to a new generation of weavers emerging in those tribes where the tradition will live on.