Just Past Dead Center, 1991
Plaited Elm Bark, 27" x 21" x 13"
John McQueen was born in Oakland, Illinois, in 1943. He studied at Florida State University, Tallahassee, in 1961-63 and the University of Indiana in Bloomington in 1964-65 before completing a B.A. at the University of South Florida in Tampa in 1971 and an M.F.A. at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1975. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowships and a United States/Japan Friendship Commission Fellowship. He has participated in several exhibitions, including shows at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Kansas City Art Institute, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, and the Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum in Trondheim, Norway. Although McQueen originally created conventional works using sod and adobe clay, in 1975 he started making meditational baskets. This momentous shift made him a leading figure of the movement that questioned the traditional distinction between craft and art. At the same time, he revolutionized the conventional definition of a basket. Issues of containment, isolation, security, and control are central to his work. He deftly weaves his baskets out of bark, twigs, vines, and burrs, using self-taught or invented patterns. Their highly original forms often explore the connections between nature and man. In 1979 he began incorporating words into his baskets, establishing a fertile dialogue between a basket as a container of space and language as a carrier of thought.
*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.