Eva Wolfe (NC, 1922-2004), Cherokee Double Weave Lidded Storage Basket

Big Cove community, of rectangular form, double weave rivercane with butternut and bloodroot dyes, featuring the "Eye of the Sacred Bird" design, retaining the Qualla Arts and Crafts tag listing the craftworker and the pencil notation "June 1982" to verso, also retaining a first place ribbon from the Cherokee Indian Fall Festival.

11 x 17 x 13 in.

Private Collection, Greensboro, North Carolina

For a similar example, see Case Auctions, January 30, 2021, Lot 603.

Eva Wolfe was born in 1922 in Soco, a remote community on the eastern edge of the Qualla Boundary. As a young girl, she learned to make baskets from her mother. While Wolfe was still in high school, her aunt, Lottie Queen Stamper, began to teach basket weaving at the Cherokee Indian School. Wolfe studied rivercane basketry with Stamper and, after high school, attended adult education classes. In the late 1950s, when she was in her mid 30s, Wolfe realized the limited craftworkers who knew how to weave in the difficult double weave tradition, which lead her to focus on this technique so that it might be retained and preserved for future generations of Cherokee craftworkers.

Wolfe won many awards at the annual Cherokee Fair. In 1968, her work placed first in an exhibit sponsored by the US Department of the Interior. In December 1969, the Indian Arts and Crafts Board and Qualla Arts and Crafts artisan cooperative organized a display of 18 of Wolfe’s baskets for an exhibition. That same year she won first prize from the US Department of the Interior for a double weave rivercane basket and her work was shown at the Renwick Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1977, she was awarded a grant from National Endowment for the Arts that helped her “secure materials for more baskets.” In 1980, her work was part of an inaugural exhibition at the Appalachian Center for Crafts in Tennessee. In 1988, she was awarded the Brown-Hudson Folklore Award from the North Carolina Folklore Society. 4 The following year she received a Heritage Award from the North Carolina Arts Council.

Literature:
M. Anna Fariello, Cherokee Basketry: From the Hands of our Elders, published by The History Press (2009).

Mollie Blankenship and Stephen Richmond, Contemporary Artists and Craftsmen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians: Promotional Exhibits, 1969-1985, Cherokee, NC: Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, Inc, (1987).

Mollie Blankenship, Eva Wolfe: Traditional Basketweaver, North Carolina Folklore Journal 35, no. 2 (summer-fall 1988), 95.

McGowan, Thomas and Allen, Lucy, A Treasury of Tar Heel Folk Artists: The North Carolina Folk Heritage Award, 1989-1996, North Carolina Folklore Journal 44, no. 1-2 (1997), 17.

Arlene Hirschfelder, American Indian Lives: Artists and Craftspeople New York: Facts on File (1994), 82.

Overall good estate condition with some light dust to interstices.