Rowena Bradley (NC, 1922-2003), Cherokee Double Weave Lidded Storage Basket

Swimmer Branch, Painttown Community, double weave rivercane with walnut and bloodroot dyes, of tall rectangular form and featuring a continuous vertical zig-zag pattern, retaining Qualla Arts and Crafts tag listing the craftworker.

12 1/2 x 9 x 9 in.

Private Collection, Greensboro, North Carolina

Born in 1922, Rowena Bradley was raised on Swimmer Branch in the Painttown Community on the Qualla Indian Boundary, lands owned by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Rowena was the youngest of six children and learned to weave baskets by watching her mother and making her first basket when she was just six-years-old.

Cherokee basketry often involved the entire family. Rowena Bradley’s father, Henry Bradley, Principal Chief of the Eastern Band, and her brother Jim, participated by gathering rivercane and digging roots for dye materials. Still in most cases the actual weaving of baskets was executed by the women in the family. Rowena Bradley, her sister Ellen Arneach, their mother, Nancy George Bradley (1881-1963), and their grandmother, Mary Dobson (b. circa 1857) were all basket weavers.

In 1974, and exhibition of Rowena's basketry was held at Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual in Cherokee, North Carolina. Funded, in part, by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board and the North Carolina Arts Council, the exhibition included (15) rivercane baskets, several of them double weave. By the mid 1970s, Bradley’s rivercane baskets were in demand. Of the 15 baskets in the show, three were in the permanent collection of the US Department of Interior’s Indian Arts and Crafts Board. The exhibit brochure mentions that Bradley earned numerous awards from showing her baskets at the annual Cherokee Indian Fair.

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

Indian Arts and Crafts Board, Rivercane Basketry by Rowena Bradley Cherokee, North Carolina (1974), reprinted in Mollie Blankenship and Stephen Richmond, Contemporary Artists and Craftsmen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians: Promotional Exhibits, 1969-1985 , published by Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, Inc, Cherokee, North Carolina (1987).

Overall good condition with some light dust to interstices.