Kelly Church - Earthly Observatory

Artists

Kelly Church

woodlandarts.com

Sustaining Traditions – Then and Now, 2020
Black ash, copper, sweetgrass, and Rit dye

A member of the Pottawatomi/Ottawa, Match-e-be-nash she-wish Tribe in Michigan, Church is a fifth-generation black ash basket maker. This green basket resembles an emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle that, since its arrival in Michigan in 2002, has ravaged the very ash trees on which her basket-weaving depends. In this way, Church’s basket comes to embody the Midwest’s rapidly changing ecology as well as an expression of cultural continuity in the face of such ongoing environmental transformation.

Courtesy of the artist.

Kelly Church -

Kelly Church -

Kelly Church, a fifth-generation basket maker who grew up in southwestern Michigan, is a member of the Pottawatomi/Ottawa, Match-e-be-nash-she-wish Tribe. Church studied the Odawa language from her paternal grandmother and learned black ash basketry from her father, Bill Church, and cousin, John Pigeon. She, in turn, has taught her daughter, Cherish Parrish. Church won the National Museum of the American Indian Artist Leadership Program Award in 2010, a Native Scholars Fellowship in 2016 from the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Endowment for the Arts named her as one of its National Heritage Fellows in 2018. She has an AFA degree from the Institute of American Indian Studies and a BFA degree from the University of Michigan.