Telfair presents a lecture by two distinguished speakers, scholar Dale Rosengarten and Basketmaker Nakia Wigfall to open the museum’s first convening on African American basketry traditions. Dr. Rosengarten will give a talk entitled "Bulrush Is Silver, Sweetgrass Is Gold": The Enduring Art of the Lowcountry Basket. Ms. Wigfall will lecture on her work and show examples she is currently working on. 

Dale Rosengarten, Ph.D., has been studying the tradition of African American coiled basketry since 1984. As guest curator for McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina, she developed the exhibition and catalog Row Upon Row: Sea Grass Baskets of the South Carolina Lowcountry (1986, 4th edition 2022). Her doctoral dissertation for Harvard University (1997) placed the Lowcountry basket in a global setting and led to the production of an exhibit and book titled Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art (2008). The show traveled nationally for two years and ended its tour with a six-month run at the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution. Rosengarten is currently working with Charleston’s Gibbes Museum of Art on a retrospective of the art of basket maker Mary Foreman Jackson. Pursuing her other field of research—southern Jewish history and culture—Rosengarten was founding director of the Jewish Heritage Collection at the College of Charleston Library and curated the exhibition A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life (2002).

Nakia Wigfall hails from a distinguished lineage of sweetgrass basketmakers, tracing her ancestry five generations back to slavery. Raised in the Six Mile community of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina Renowned for her sweetgrass basketry, Ms. Wigfall is deeply rooted in this cultural family tradition. She has presented keynote talks at museums, galleries, and universities, and has appeared in documentaries aired on ETV, PBS, and CNN Brasil. Ms. Wigfall contributed to SCETV’s Carolina Stories series, ‘Gullah Roots’, which explores the Gullah Geechee Corridor’s connections with West Africa, educating audiences about Gullah heritage in spiritual, musical, and artistic forms. She also appeared in PBS’s ‘The Good Road’, a documentary series highlighting philanthropists and changemakers addressing global humanitarian concerns. Ms. Wigfall has explored her ancestral roots, and similarities between her work and that of Senegalese basket makers and has undertaken international collaborative projects with basket makers in Sierra Leone and the Bahamas.