The sweetgrass smells different when it’s fresh.
I didn’t know that until I watched Mary Jackson—one of the last master weavers in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina—split a single blade into four impossibly thin strands with nothing but her thumbnail and decades of muscle memory. She was making a coil basket, the kind that Gullah communities have woven for over three centuries, using techniques that survived the Middle Passage from West Africa. The baskets look deceptively simple: circular, tight-coiled, golden-brown. But here’s the thing—they’ve quietly reshaped how contemporary craft designers think about materiality, cultural authenticity, and what it means to preserve tradition in a world that fetishizes the handmade while underpaying the people who actually make things by hand. Jackson died in 2013, and her baskets now sit in the Smithsonian, which feels both right and deeply wrong in ways I’m still trying to articulate. The Gullah people descend from enslaved West Africans who worked rice plantations along the Carolina and Georgia coasts, and their basketry—originally utilitarian, designed for winnowing rice—has become one of the most visible markers of African cultural retention in North America, though “retention” feels like too sterile a word for something this alive.
When Function Becomes Art and Nobody Asks the Artist
The baskets started as tools. Fanner baskets, specifically, designed to separate rice grains from chaff using a tossing motion that required exactly the right weave tension—too loose and the rice falls through, too tight and the chaff sticks. Then tourists discovered them in the mid-20th century, and the market shifted. Suddenly these objects that had been doing quiet agricultural work for generations became “folk art,” which sounds like a compliment until you realize it often means “charming artifact made by people we don’t consider real artists.” Contemporary designers—particularly in the sustainable craft movement—have adopted Gullah coiling techniques, the use of native grasses, the aesthetic of visible materiality. You see it in high-end home goods catalogs now, baskets that sell for $200 at urban craft fairs, often made by white artisans who may or may not credit the tradition they’re drawing from.
The Sweetgrass is Disappearing and That’s Not a Metaphor
Anyway, here’s where it gets complicated.
Muhlenbergia filipes—sweetgrass—grows in coastal wetlands that are rapidly being developed into golf courses and resort communities. The plant itself is becoming scarce, which means the basketmakers have to drive further to harvest it, trespass on private property, or pay inflated prices to suppliers. I’ve seen estimates that suggest there are fewer than 200 active Gullah basket sewers left, most of them over sixty, and the knowledge transfer is breaking down because younger generations can’t make a living wage from basketry when a basket that takes forty hours to complete might sell for $300 if they’re lucky. Meanwhile, design schools teach “coiling techniques inspired by indigenous traditions” without necessarily connecting students to the living communities still practicing those traditions. It’s cultural appropriation in the most literal sense—taking the form while leaving the people behind—but it’s also more complicated than that binary allows, because craft knowledge has always moved between cultures, and the line between influence and theft isn’t always clear.
What Museums Don’t Tell You About Materiality and Muscle Memory
The thing about Gullah basketry that contemporary designers seem to understand only partially is that it’s not just about the final object. It’s about the knowledge embedded in the weaver’s hands—how to identify sweetgrass by feel in the dark, how to gauge moisture content, where to place the transition from grass to pine needle to bulrush so the coil stays structurally sound. This is haptic intelligence, and it doesn’t transfer through photographs or instructional videos. When craft designers incorporate “Gullah-inspired” elements into their work, they’re often working from visual reference, which means they’re getting the surface but missing the substrate. I used to think that was enough—that formal influence was a valid form of cultural conversation. Now I’m not sure. The baskets in museum collections are frozen, isolated from the hands that made them and the communities that gave those hands meaning, and when designers study them there, they’re studying ghosts.
Why the Design World Needs to Recieve This Tradition Differently
There are counter-examples, I guess.
Some contemporary designers have built genuine collaborative relationships with Gullah basket sewers, creating projects that direct money back to the community and credit the tradition explicitly. The Halsey Institute in Charleston has done work here, as has the Lowcountry Gullah Heritage Corridor, though I worry that institutional validation comes too late and helps too little. The broader craft design world is starting to have uncomfortable conversations about extraction—who gets to use which techniques, what constitutes appropriate attribution, how to structure economic relationships that don’t just replicate existing power dynamics with better branding. But those conversations are happening in design conferences and academic journals while the basket stands on Highway 17 sit empty more often than not because tourists would rather buy a mass-produced sweetgrass knockoff for $30 than pay $400 for the real thing, and honestly I can’t decide if that’s economic pragmatism or cultural amnesia. Maybe it’s both. What I know is this: Gullah basketry hasn’t just influenced contemporary craft design—it’s revealed the fault lines in how the design world thinks about tradition, authorship, and who gets to profit from cultural knowledge. The baskets are still being made, but the conditions that allow them to be made are eroding, and all the design inspiration in the world won’t matter if the tradition itself becomes definitately unsustainable for the people who carry it.
