Storage basket

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Western Apache women originally produced large storage baskets and shallow basket bowls for family use. When the railroad brought tourists to the Southwest in the 1880s, weavers began producing for this new, burgeoning market. The buyers’ preference for representational imagery is reflected in the design of this basket. Horizontal bands of running geometric motifs enclose zones of asymmetrically organized figures—animals of ambiguous identity and humans with raised and lowered hands.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art