Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art, an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, tells the story of the coiled sweetgrass baskets made by the Gullah/Geechee people of the southeastern United States — descendants of slaves brought from Africa 300 years ago. Sweetgrass baskets, once used to process and store rice and other goods, are now highly valued works of art sought by collectors and museums. The exhibit includes the above 1998 photography by Dale Rosengarten, one of the curators of the exhibition, of a Senegalese woman carrying backets on her head.

African slaves in North America used tools such as wide, flat winnowing baskets called fanners. Their knowledge of rice cultivation and basket making was critical to the success of agriculture in the Lowcountry (the marshy coastal areas and islands) of Florida, Georgia and North and South Carolina. Double and triple baskets were common on Lowcountry rice plantations. The same forms, fashioned in sweetgrass, are sewn in South Carolina today. Weaving and coiling are two popular techniques for making baskets. The technique is often determined by the choice of available plant materials. The above stacked basket was made before the Civil War in an Alabama county settled largely by people from South Carolina.

Sweetgrass is native to the coastal dunes of the Carolinas, and it provided an ideal material for African slaves to produce a tightly woven coiled basket. Today’s virtuoso Lowcountry basket makers often create ingenious designs such as the above “wave” basket made with sweetgrass and bulrush sewn with palmetto. Elsie McCabe, president of the Museum for African Art, says she grew up “learning that the African contributions to the building of America were a strong back and broad shoulders — brawn.” The exhibition made her see that “they also contributed technical know-how. There was a lot that Africans could share and, in fact, teach.” The baskets will be on display at the Smithsonian until November 28th, before moving on to New York’s National Museum for African Art.