Lisa LaRue-Baker

Basketry, Twining, Embellished Digital Collage Cherokee Nation Topeka, Kansas
Lisa LaRue-Baker brings a contemporary spirit to double walled basketry. She keeps the inside of the basket traditional and expresses herself with unusual designs and materials on the outside. She uses upcycled material in her twined bags, including remnants of locally handspun llama wool and pieces of silk saris that she orders from a women’s collective in India. Lisa also works in embellished digital collage, painting and building upon the surfaces of vintage photographs of Native figures; the medium recalls her background as a graphic artist in the days of pasteup who learned computer-aided design on the first Apple computers.
Lisa learned basketry from Anna Sixkiller, one of her clan mothers and a Cherokee Nation master basket maker. She worked for many years at the Cherokee Nation Cultural Resource Center in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and was later director of language, history and culture for the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma. She has taught hundreds of children to make baskets, cornhusk dolls, traditional clothing, and jewelry. She owns the 785 Arts studio and gallery in Topeka and founded The DoPiKa Project, a citywide land acknowledgement program that teaches the Indigenous history of Topeka and promotes local Indigenous artists. Her work is in the Alice C. Sabatini Gallery (the oldest art collection in Kansas) and numerous private collections.