New Initiatives and Leaders Are Bringing Power and Profits to America’s Crafting Communities

Just north of Charleston, South Carolina, is Mount Pleasant, a sprawling suburb filled with cookie-cutter residential developments and run-of-the-mill strip malls. At first glance, it’s not a place that seems to have anything to do with handcrafts and centuries-old design traditions, but behind the bland facades lies the center of the Gullah sweetgrass basketmaking community. Gullah people are descended from Africans enslaved on the southeastern United States coast, and the region’s relative geographic isolation has meant that the area has been able to preserve a distinct culture and language. Collectors often venture there in search of the baskets, which stem from a sewing culture developed on nearby plantations, with roots in West African traditions.

For decades, a stretch of the town’s main drag, Highway 17, served as a sales point for local makers. Stalls used to line the route, but as the area grew in population, the road went from two lanes to six, edging out roadside shops. Development hasn’t only thwarted designers’ ability to easily reach their customers; it has also limited access to wetlands and materials like bulrush, pine needles, and palmetto, which are vital to basketmaking.

"Many basketmakers are either too old or the distance to resources is too far, and they don’t have transportation to get there," says fourth-generation sewer and unofficial community leader Henrietta Snype. "The people who used to harvest the material have died."

The challenges are at odds with a broader resurgence of interest in American traditional crafts. Over the past two decades, independent designers and entrepreneurs have reemployed vintage hand techniques to make small-batch or one-off items that are more reflective of individual creativity than machine-made products. The trend has touched everything from kitchen accessories to furniture and even food.

For many reviving these artisanal cottage industries—often white middle- or upper-class makers—the crafts are a side hustle that don’t weigh heavily on their financial security. This has set the precedent that craft objects, regardless of how difficult they are to make, can be sold cheaply, an expectation that can stymie less affluent Black and Indigenous artisans, especially. Even when outsiders do value works from those groups, they often have exploited those communities.

Gullah sweetgrass baskets are expensive, and customers don’t always understand why. They can cost anywhere from a few hundred to many thousands of dollars, depending on their size and level of detail.

"A remnant of us are still handing this down from generation to generation. My daughter, she knows how to do it. My son does, too. I’m teaching my granddaughter. She’s only two."

—Nakia Wigfall, basketmaker

"My pieces are collector’s items," says Nakia Wigfall, another sweetgrass basket sewer. "Those baskets are expensive. As they should be." For most of Wigfall’s career, she worked several different jobs, including at a craft store, to sustain her practice, because she was unable to sell her pieces for a fair amount. A basket may take months to make, and the labor required is complex. Sewers use palmetto fronds to secure sweetgrass coils together and build the basic shape, which varies according to the design. Pine needles are used to give the baskets color variation, and bulrush provides strength.

The baskets require skilled, specific hand techniques that not just anyone can pick up and replicate—though people try. "A lot of folks have been trying to pass off baskets [as Gullah]," Wigfall says. Ensuring that the works are sold for the right price is an ongoing struggle, and as other communities have found, the road to establishing a sustainable market is not always straightforward.