Basketry is likely the oldest art form in what is now Maine. And, though there are many basket-weaving techniques and practices in the area today, Wabanaki basketry is one of the few such traditions that is indigenous. The Wabanaki Nation (consisting of five distinct indigenous communities) has produced woven baskets using the native trees and grasses of the northeastern United States for millennia, though today only a few have the skill and knowledge necessary to harvest and weave black ash, sweetgrass, and porcupine quills into these deliriously intricate vessels.
One of these skilled basket makers, a member of the Penobscot Nation, was Robert S. Anderson. Anderson passed away in 2020, and bequeathed his collection of baskets and tools (both his own and those of his ancestors) to the University of Maine’s Hudson Museum in Orono, to be held only until the Penobscot Nation builds its own museum. Anderson is a descendant of the Shay family, who owned and sold their wares from 1930 until 2002 at the Indian Camp Basket Tent, located at a place known in the Penobscot language as mag-win’-teg-wak, or “choppy seas,” on Lincolnville Beach in Midcoast Maine.
The Farnsworth Art Museum, around thirty minutes south of Lincolnville Beach in Rockland, Maine, is now hosting a celebration of the works of Anderson and his fellow Penobscot artisans entitled Magwintegwak: A Legacy of Penobscot Basketry. The exhibition focuses on the makers of the Midcoast and the magnificent baskets (also known as “fancy baskets”) produced there. It is a grand showcase of a Native American art form, one that relies on traditional knowledge, both of craft and of nature. Times have changed for Native communities in Maine, and the fauna of Maine is changing as well. Today the emerald ash borer threatens the trees from which these baskets are made, making the Farnsworth’s recognition even more timely.
Visitors to the exhibition will be able to view a range of vessels, woven by the Shay family and others to serve various purposes, and in a wide variety of forms—from a sewing kit (woven scissors case, thimble case, needle case, pincushion basket, and a tiny button basket in “curlybowl” style) to a small sweetgrass basket in the shape of a pineapple, with purple-dyed ash strips that are crimped to evoke the fruit’s spiky exterior. Examples of traditional Penobscot basketry produced in the years since Anderson’s death remind us that this is not just a historical art form—it is a living one.
Robert S. Anderson once scoured antiques shops and flea markets, reclaiming and preserving the hand tools used to make these woven baskets. With the splint gauges, crooked knives, blocks, and splitters and scrapers he saved, as well as the baskets he made, he also held on to a piece of his own heritage. At the Farnsworth it is clear that, despite centuries of hardship and change, the Penobscot people and the natural features of their land, simultaneously, persist.
Magwintegwak: A Legacy of Penobscot Basketry • Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine • to January 5, 2025 • farnsworth museum.org
