Descended from Chitimacha and Choctaw artisans, Sarah Sense employs family basket-making knowledge to dynamically woven photo collages on view at Silverstein Gallery in Chelsea. Colonial documents, maps and her own contemporary landscape photographs are the material from which Sense weaves patterns inspired by specific baskets created by Chitimacha makers that were once part of the dispersed McIlhenny family’s collection, now housed in the Montclair Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art and Worcester Art Museum. The trauma represented by these baskets – produced for collectors as Chitimacha land was continually encroached upon and the community threatened – is not their end message, however. Rather Sense explains that she intends her work as a healing gesture pointing to time’s cyclical nature. (On view through Nov 23rd.)
