Festival to showcase sweetgrass culture

The art of the Lowcountry sweetgrass basket will be on display Friday and Saturday at Laing Middle School.

Karin Willis/Museum for African Art

The Snipe family basket stand on Highway 17 in Mount Pleasant wraps around a blue house that was inhabited until recently, when the highway was widened, bringing traffic too close for comfort.

The Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival, part of the larger Piccolo Spoleto Festival, will offer its usual basketweaving events, but also will provide a sneak preview of a documentary, "Grassroots: The Enduring Art of the Lowcountry Basket."

The 30-minute film, directed by Dana Sardet, tells the stories of local basketmakers.

Nakia Wigfall, who acted as a community liaison in the filming process, found the interviews fascinating.

Local basketmakers describe harvesting the sweetgrass, making the baskets and selling the finished product, said Wigfall, also executive director of the festival board of directors.

"Everything a basketmaker goes through, the documentary tells that story," Wigfall said.

The documentary will be shown six times throughout the festival and eventually will become part of a larger traveling exhibit of Lowcountry and African baskets called "Grassroots: African Origins of an American Art" that opens for the first time at the Gibbes Museum of Art in August.

Dale Rosengarten, curator for special collections at the College of Charleston Addlestone Library, was integrally involved in the documentary and the accompanying exhibit.

"It (the documentary) very much focuses on the contemporary scene," Rosengarten said.

Together, the documentary and the exhibit go beyond Lowcountry roots trying to connect basketmaking to its African roots. Rosengarten said it's a comprehensive history.

The project has been in the works for three years, but Rosengarten first became involved in the Lowcountry's basket history in the 1980s.

"It's a natural outgrowth of work I've been doing for 25 years," she said.

Thousands might have the chance to view the film. Mount Pleasant Town Councilwoman Thomasena Stokes-Marshall, Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival project director, expects 4,500 to 5,000 people to visit Laing Middle School over the two days.

Marshall said it's the largest display of sweetgrass baskets in the Lowcountry.

Demonstrations of basket-weaving will include opportunities for attendees to give basketmaking a try.

And members of a Clemson University and the College of Charleston research team working to map basketmaking communities also will be available to study and share results of their research over the past 18 months.

Reach Jessica Johnson at 937-5921.