Baskets
Archive

Terrol Dew Johnson (1971-2024) was a prolific Tohono O’odham artist, weaver, educator and activist. For close to twenty years we made baskets with Terrol, collaborating on a range of projects. Our interest in craft and traditional wisdoms comes from him.

year

2006

Collaborator

Terrol Dew Johnson

Representation

Volume Gallery

Knot 01

Before Terrol, we had always described our approach to design as computational, since we preferred to use software and computer code to create our work. Our exchanges with Terrol taught us something else: that with any technique—whether one calls it craft or computation—there exists a certain disengagement from the object being formed; the process becomes more about the relations around that object. Working in this way allows us to question what a basket can be.

Photo: Steven Meckler

Terrol speaks of basket-making as a process that brings people together, both those around him and the ancestors through which he continues a tradition. He describes many voices in that object, as if each basket is, in essence, a conversation.

So too, we began to think of making things as conversation between themes of universal significance, such as geometry and matter, with the actual experiences through which these become manifest. It is a boundless and inspiring conversation, one that reminds us that designing can be about communing between two worlds: one entirely abstract and coded, the other very real and alive. The baskets also teach us that the truly inspired moment of design comes in realizing that neither of these worlds is of our own making—both were always there, and somehow discovered along the way.

Artists Space 2006

The Baskets project began in 2006 at Artists Space in New York and continues to this day. They have been shown at the MoMA, MOCA Tucson, Chicago Biennial, Sarasota Museum of Art, Volume Gallery, Heard Museum, Institute of American Indian Arts, among others. Several works from the Baskets project are in the permanent collections of these institutions.

Works