The Native American baskets sold in the early 20th century at Abe Cohn’s Emporium, a men’s clothing store in Carson City, Nev., were exceptional. They were woven by Dat So La Lee, said to be a “princess” of the nearby Washoe people, whose royal status only allowed her to use a special style of weaving.
The truth was less exciting. That So La Lee preferred her English name, Louisa Keyser. She was a Washoe woman, but the stories Cohn and his wife Amy told about her—her prized heritage, her encounter with Civil War General John C. Frémont—were myths.
As for many of the distinctive and beautiful curved bulges of her baskets, known as degikup, it was almost certainly influenced by the baskets of another people, the Maidu, just as the fine stitching of Keyser’s work was slightly derived from the baskets of weather another people. Native American people, the Pomo. Nothing gave Keyser the special authority to make her baskets her way.
“Swapping and borrowing was common in the production of baskets for the curio trade,” Marvin S. Cohodas, professor emeritus of art history at the University of British Columbia, who wrote an essay on Keyser to accompany the exhibit, said in an email.
According to Cohodas, the Cohns originally hired Keyser as their washerwoman. The Cohns noticed her skill—she may have started wrapping Abe’s whiskey bottles—and supported her financially in exchange for her exclusive weaving services (she no longer had to clean for it).
The Cohns formed their apocryphal embellishments as the extraordinary artistic value of the baskets became apparent. They also arranged for her to weave outside or, in winter, in the Emporium’s window; at least once Amy Cohn gave a lecture while Keyser posed next to her.
Whatever their backstory, Keyser’s baskets sold well and are considered remarkable today. They can be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
And after only a handful have been sold in the past half century – one in 2007 for $1.2 million, a high sum at the time – they are about to get a new spotlight: five will be featured on the Independent 20th Century art fair. opened Thursday in lower Manhattan as part of what the fair calls a “grand highlight exhibition” designed by architect Annabelle Selldorf.
Prices for the five baskets, one of which was in reserve on Tuesday, range from $350,000 to $1.5 million, said Donald Ellis, whose namesake Vancouver Gallery commissioned the minishow.
Keyser, who lived from about 1850 to 1925, is one of the most prominent names in Native basket weaving, says Jessica L. Horton, a professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of Delaware. Ellis, in an interview, called her “the Rembrandt or Michelangelo of the field,” adding of Native American art, “It’s considered the best basket-making culture in the world, and she was the best at it.”
Melanie Smokey, a Washoe weaver, said: “Our Washoe tribe, a very small tribe, is known all over the country for its work.”
Keyser’s baskets were arguably made possible not only by her talent and efforts, but also by the support of white patrons, a sensational legend, and a contemporary “basket craze” that placed a premium on the exoticism and authenticity of native crafts.
Remarkably, in an era plagued by questions of cultural appropriation, Ellis doesn’t shy away from this kink in the story of Keyser and her baskets. Gallery promotional materials refer to the Cohns’ “elaborate false stories” and the halo of “pseudomythological significance” they constructed around Keyser.
“While there are some today who imagine that the Cohns took advantage of Keyser, the purpose of this presentation is to bring to the forefront Keyser’s exceptional artistic output while acknowledging the complex relationship that made this possible, Ellis said in an email.
Herman Fillmore, director of culture and language resources for the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, said cultural borrowing was common among Washoe in Keyser’s day, for example in adapting modern materials such as canvas to build warmer homes. “It’s not right for the rest of us to tell our basket weavers how to weave their baskets,” he said.
For Horton, the professor, Keyser’s story is important to understanding her baskets, even if not in the way the Cohns intended.
“It is complicated where we direct our gratitude,” she said, “but thanks to the fraught relationship that unfolded around the Cohns’ Emporium and her own artistic brilliance and fortitude, we know her name and have an archive in which to record the details. can reread. of her life, and the quite inspiring story of an Indigenous woman in the early 1900s who navigated a global art market under conditions of horrific colonization.
The five baskets at the fair come from Keyser’s classic middle period. Among them is a 1916 one titled “Myriads of Stars Shine Over Our Dead Ancestors,” which Abe Cohn, Ellis said, considered her greatest work (as did Ellis). Another copy, titled “Brotherhood of Men,” was the one the Ellis Gallery sold in 2007 for $1.2 million. Most of Keyser’s 150 or so surviving works are in institutions, Ellis said.
Then, as now, the degikup visible in four baskets of the show is a source of much enthusiasm around them. “It’s a basket with high walls,” said Horton, “and in its most perfected form, the actual designs integrated into the walls of the basket will flare out and then shrink to emphasize the sculptural form.”
For centuries, baskets have been an important part of the culture and lifestyle of the Washoe, whose word for “lake” came to be understood as the Sierra Nevada’s most famous landmark. (The name Lake Tahoe, Fillmore noted, is something like “lake lake.”)
Like other developments in weaving of the period, degikup arose not from utilitarian considerations – that is, the best way to design a basket in which to transport things – but rather from the demand for baskets made of non-native people. consumers who sought them out as works of art. .
“The fact that these baskets would not undergo heavy wear and tear meant that more of the basket could be covered with design,” said Cohodas. “Innovation was rampant, with weavers using everything available, including new tools, shapes, materials and designs.”
One Pomo weaver adapted Keyser’s degikup, he noted. A Yokuts weaver used Apache designs. The Washoe weaver Sarah Jim Mayo, like Keyser, was widely imitated.
“There was no criticism of these actions as appropriations,” Cohodas added. “Also, there was no criticism when most Washoe weavers adopted the degikup form, and many weavers also adapted Keyser’s flame design and scattering pattern.”
Heather Law Pezzarossi, a professor of anthropology at Syracuse University, argued that our contemporary arguments about cultural appropriation are misapplied to Keyser’s baskets.
“Authenticity is an all-Western, American fixation that we applied to this concept of indigenousness to make it part of an American past, not an American future,” she said, noting that it was the Cohns who were most invested in the concept.
“Instead of valuing these baskets for the way those Western art dealers told us to value them a hundred years ago,” added Pezzarossi, “why don’t we look at them again and value them in a different way?”
Independent 20th century
September 7-10, Battery Maritime Building at Cipriani, 10 South Street, Lower Manhattan; independenthq.com.
