Lowell Lecture

Artist Demonstration: Native American Basket Making

Date & Time

May 6, 2018 at noon - 3 p.m.

Location

Museum of Fine Arts
465 Huntington Avenue Boston, MA 02115
Driving Directions

Speaker(s)

Theresa Secord

Presenting Organization

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Explore the intricacies of basket weaving, one of humankind’s oldest, universal art forms. Using natural woods, barks, plants, and grasses, Native weavers from across North America create beautiful art and functional objects. Master basket maker, Theresa Secord (Penobscot) demonstrates the artistic process and shares the cultural significance of ash and sweetgrass basketry, an ancient New England craft that she is working to revive.

Theresa Secord has been making baskets for 30 years and has won many awards for her work. She is the founding and former director of the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance, whose mission is to preserve traditional ash and sweet grass basketry among the Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Maliseet, and Micmac tribes in Maine.

As a passionate cultural advocate for this endangered tradition, Secord was named a 2016 National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts, a lifetime achievement award for artistic excellence, cultural advocacy and preservation.

She shares new innovations in this traditional art, such as the addition of cedar bark, to help conserve the precious ash trees, now threatened by the emerald ash borer beetle.