How Many Spokes Does it Take to Make a Wheel? A Basket? A Pomo Community?

Pomo Basket Weaver No.2

Spokes of the Pomo Community Series

I live in Northern California, Lake-Sonoma-Mendocino counties. I have an affinity for the people on whose land I live. The Pomo people.

If you've ever seen Pomo baskets they are unbelievably beautiful. I remember admiring them as a young child in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology on UC Berkeley campus. Experts say that they are the best in the world. Most of them were made by women artists.

I am an artist and a woman. This group of women artists from the turn of the 19th Century to the present make objects of daily use that bear their aesthetic fingerprint. Historically they must have been the anchors or spokes of the community wheel amongst their people. The weavers carried on from one generation to the next, the traditions of craft, of symbology, of language, of self-respect during a very difficult time of westward moving settlers.

Spokes are also the warp or main structure of the twined basket.

These women artists inspired me and I wanted to represent them. The drawings are my own artistic interpretations, representations of these special people. Disclaimer: Any resemblance to real persons, dead or alive, or other real-life entities, past or present, is purely coincidental.

I don't know why I do it but I just have to.

If you'd like to purchase this original drawing, please click on Works on Paper: Originals or a framed print at a 20% Discount, Works on Paper: Prints

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