Dead, Not Forgotten

Lilly Baker contributed greatly to preserving the art of Maidu basket weaving, and in doing so she has preserved so much more.

I first heard of the ConCow Maidu people from a TV documentary which in part described a shocking and shameful event when these original inhabitants of Northern California were deprived of their lands by the U.S. government and sequestered in a corral where many died from deprivation and disease. Now through the art of Lilly Baker I am pleased and saddened to learn more of the Maidu people. The abuse that they suffered at the hands of government and settlers alike is very hard to read about but I am happy to say that they survived and continue to contribute to our world.

A wonderful way that they have done so recently, and Lilly Baker was part of it, is through a pilot land management program in cooperation with the National Forest Service. Forest Service land in the area of the tribe’s original range are now being cared for by tribe members using traditional Maidu husbandry techniques that selectively trim or remove vegetation to encourage the health of the natural environment.

So what do you do with the trimmings? That’s right, you make baskets! Lilly taught her students that one must weave the energy of the plant materials into the baskets they made and collecting your materials yourself while you improve environmental health can only help to understand this.

Her family’s story of basket making was documented in a video produced by the Plumas County Museum called “Dancing with the Bears.”

Born July 6, 1911, Lilly Baker died at the Indian Valley Long-Term Care Facility in Greenville, CA on Monday, Nov. 2, 2006 at age 95.

Read the Plumas County News obituary

Learn more about the Maidu people

See Maidu baskets

Popularity: 32%

Anybody that pays attention to the history of entertainment legal issues knows that artists in all medias are often separated from the ownership of their works by entertainment business people, resulting in little being paid to artists for their works that have had major impact on the arts and our culture.

As an entertainment lawyer and the president of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. from 1980 to 1992, Rothenberg did much to change that. His seminal books, “Legal Protection of Literature, Art & Music” (1960, reissued in 1988) and “Copyright and Public Performance of Music” (1954, reissued in 1987) educated generations of artists and protected them from their own naiveté and the business practices of others.

Stanley Rothenberg died on Friday November 3 2006 in Manhattan. He was 76.

For more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Rothenberg

Popularity: 15%

Mose Toliver, a celebrated artist in the “Outsider Movement,” died of pneumonia 10/29/2006 in Montgomery, Alabama.

Signing his works Mose T, Tolliver was a self-taught artist using common house paints to realize his visions of birds, flowers, women and his well known self-portraits. His rise in notoriety was supported by the inclusion of his work in the influential 1982 exhibit “Black Folk Art in America: 1930-1980″ at the Smithsonian’s Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Tolliver began painting in the 1960s and hung his paintings on trees in his front yard using dental floss or pop tops from beverage cans as hangers. His work now hangs in institutions such as the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Museum of American Folk Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution, the Milwaukee Art Museum and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Popularity: 19%

In the newly globalized post World War Two environment, activity in the arts surged fantastically. Replete with new themes, new forms and new opportunities for artists, the art world also became a home for a new breed of impresarios. Pontus Hulten was one of them.

Hulten was director of an impressive list of museums around the world and in many cases the founding director. Among them are the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, the Kunsthalle in Bonn, the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Shows that he organized appeared in venerable institutions such as the National Museum of Sweden, Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris.

As an impresario of his time, Hulton was a champion of contemporary art. Among those he worked with were Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, the animation filmmaker Robert Breer, éminence grise Marcel Ducham, Pablo Picasso, Claes Oldenburg, Edward Kienholz and Andy Warhol, as well as producing retrospectives of Jackson Pollock, Lucio Fontana, Jean Fautrier, Joseph Beuys, Niki de Saint Phalle, Per Olof Ultvedt, Nam June Paik, Robert Irwin and Sam Francis.

But with Pontus Hulten it was as much about context as it was about content. Rangng from the style of exhibition to the style of exhibition space, Hulten stretched the exhibit boundries as well as the limits of compilation by joining together artists of divergent medias to create new understandings for audiences. Witness his shows in the Temporary Contemporary (a warehouse in L.A.’s Japantown) before the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles was ready for prime time as well as his demand that his personal collection of 700 works of art left to the Moderna Museet be accepted on the condition that any works not on view in the museum be made available to the public, in an open-storage warehouse.

Pontus Hulten died on October 24, 2006 at his home in Stockholm. He was 82.

For more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontus_Hult%C3%A9n
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n8_v35/ai_19416259

Popularity: 12%

Every sane person wants world peace but Sally Lilienthal did something about it. She made peace her mission when she founded the Ploughshares Fund. The fund is dedicated to preventing the spread and use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

An early recipient of Ploughshares Fund support was the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, a 1997 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

The fund, named from the text of the book of Isaiah in the Bible that reads, “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares…. neither shall they learn war anymore,” has awarded more than $40 million to groups and individuals since its inception in 1981. Currently the Ploughshares Fund awards 4 million each year.

Sally Lilienthal died October 23, 2006 at age 87 in San Francisco of a bone infection that led to pneumonia.

For more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploughshares_Fund
http://www.ploughshares.org/

Popularity: 57%