It was August 2012. New York City attorney Patti Skigen was returning from her annual trip to SWAIA’s Santa Fe Indian Market with an intriguing item among her purchases. Although the central focus of Skigen’s personal collection was pottery, she had chosen to buy a basket created by Shan Goshorn who was at the market for the first time. Goshorn, an Eastern Band Cherokee, was known in contemporary Native American art circles for her large-scale, hand-colored black and white photographs that, following in the footsteps of Fritz Scholder--who was, admittedly, one of her major influences--drew attention to the stereotyping and racism Indians endured. Surprisingly, however, the Indian Market-novice had won the Innovation Prize for basket work. And so Skigen decided to invest in Goshorn’s new endeavor despite the unpredictability of its future in the world of Native artwork.
Skigen’s new basket, was a 10-inch high piece that, in Cherokee style, rose from a 7” x 7” square base to form a circular opening at the top. It was not, however, woven from the traditional white oak, honeysuckle or river cane of Cherokee baskets. Instead, it was constructed of narrow-cut splints of Arches watercolor paper coated with acrylic--materials more closely akin to those with which Goshorn worked when producing photographic prints. The design for the basket Goshorn had entitled Our Lands Are Not Lines on Paperpresented Skigen with a zig-zag blue-gray abstracted silhouette of the Great Smoky Mountains beneath a creamy sky woven in the mountain and river pattern curving around the outside of the basket.
Closer inspection revealed that along the upper and lower border and vertically interwoven into the mountain image were tan-toned strips containing word fragments and disconnected linework. This, Goshorn explained in a blog entry she had posted earlier in the month, was a reproduction of a historical map of the Cherokee territory printed in archival ink. “Traditionally,” she had gone on to say, “We used natural landmarks to establish boundaries. Settlers brought a new way of regarding land and marking ownership.” Here lay the intention of the piece--to underscore the difference between settler and Indigenous conceptions of land--co-mingled, as within the weaving itself, with Goshorn’s artistic innovation. She was using reproductions of actual documents created by U.S. government entities as an integral part of her work, representing the way in which the tangible effects of printed pages insidiously crept into the fabric of Cherokee lives.
In researching Goshorn, Skigen would learn that even though the Atlanta College of Art graduate’s metamorphosis into political basket maker was not yet widely recognized, experts had begun to take notice. As early as 2008 the Smithsonian had scooped up her first basket offering, Pieced Treaties: Spider’s Web Treaty Basket which incorporated the ongoing revisions of the Oklahoma and Cherokee Nations Tobacco compact. By 2011 she had conquered the intricate double-weave technique, known only by 13 other living weavers at the time. She employed it to create Sealed Fate: Treaty of New Echota Protest Basket recalling the unscrupulously obtained document that eventually forced the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears in 1838. This was immediately purchased by the Gilcrease Museum. Finally, Educational Genocide: Legacy of the Carlisle Boarding School had been the winner of the 2011 Grand Prize at the Red Earth Festival.
In the years that followed, Skigen was able to keep tabs on Goshorn’s burgeoning career. Following on the heels of her success at the Indian Market, Goshorn was awarded the 2013 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, the 2013 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, 2013 SWAIA Discovery Fellowship and Best of Class at the 2013 Indian Market. She went on to win the Indian Market’s First Place in Basketry in 2014 and 2015, the 2014 Native Arts and Culture Artist Fellowship, and the 2015 United States Artists Fellowship.
The monetary component of these honors afforded her the time to advance her technique. She progressed from using simple painted splints to incorporating archival photographs into her baskets, adding a level of authenticity and immediacy to the social statements they represented. She was also able to complete scholarly archival research into the events, legislation and social climate that served as the historical underpinnings of the baskets for which she soon became internationally celebrated. As one curator wrote, “Each basket is the result of long hours of combing through America’s imperialist history and Shan’s courageous harvesting of the most sequestered stories, those that are buried in the archives and deep in the American psyche.”
Sadly, news of Goshorn’s death at the age of 61 came in December 2018. Despite her illness she had continued to work, completing dozens of acclaimed and award-winning baskets that drew attention to a wide range of inequities including the loss of Native homelands, cultural genocide, violence directed at Native women and inappropriate cultural appropriation.
By then Patti Skigen was in her mid-seventies. It was time, she decided, to share her collection with the world. She transferred the pottery to her law school alma mater, Yale University and along with it, Our Lands Are Not Lines on Paper. In November 2019, the basket was included prominently in Yale Art Gallery’s lauded exhibition, Places, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art. When that exhibition closes, Goshorn’s basket will travel to the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma for its newest exhibit, Weaving History Into Art: The Enduring Legacy of Shan Goshorn which opened in October 2020.
Although, in the end, Patti Skigen may have purchased one of Goshorn’s lesser pieces, produced before she began using the much-admired double-weave technique and before the inclusion of archival photographs, it is a piece that provides a mile marker along the road an important artist traveled to reach the zenith of her career. Consequently, the contemporary art world owes a debt to Ms. Skigen for both preserving and sharing Goshorn’s work.
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