February 15, 2023, Santa Rosa, CA — The Santa Rosa Junior College (SRJC) Multicultural Museum is preparing a unique and rare collection of Pomo basketry, never before exhibited in its entirety since its arrival at Santa Rosa Junior College 20 years ago. The exhibition, titled, “Breaking Traditions, Saving Traditions: Elsie Allen and the Legacy of Pomo Basketry,” opens on March 3 and will be on display for the rest of 2023. The Elsie Allen Pomo Basket Collection consists of over 130 masterfully woven baskets, ranging from the size of a pencil eraser to nearly 40 inches across, and spanning in date from the late 1800s to the 1980s.
The Pomo are indigenous people of Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake counties and much of the surrounding region. Elsie Allen was a native of Sonoma County, born in 1899, and a longtime resident of Ukiah. Taught basket weaving as a child, she devoted the later part of her life to basket weaving and teaching. Allen passed away in 1990. For centuries, when a Pomo woman died, tradition dictated that her baskets were burned or buried with her. With assimilation and modernization, fewer and fewer Pomo were learning traditional crafts, and Elsie Allen’s family recognized the need to preserve baskets for the survival of the art and culture.
The Elsie Allen Pomo Basket Collection was founded upon the work of Allen’s mother, Annie Burke, who was the first to recognize the need to ignore one tradition in order to save another. Burke asked her daughter to preserve her baskets after her passing, a pledge that Allen not only honored, but built upon. She convinced other native basket weavers to preserve their best works, and gradually built a collection of baskets by more than 26 different Pomo weavers, with about 30 baskets made by Allen’s own immediate family. This is the only known collection of its size to have been created and curated entirely by Native American weavers, and it is even more culturally valuable due to extensive ethnographic information accompanying nearly every basket in the collection.
In 2003, Allen’s family transferred this remarkable collection of baskets and accompanying material to the SRJC Multicultural Museum for long term preservation, research and education. For the collection’s 20th Anniversary at Santa Rosa Junior College, all the baskets will be on display, filling the museum along with photographs, previously unseen videos and stories of the weavers themselves.
The SRJC community has numerous opportunities to learn more about the cultural importance of this collection, born of the determination of Elsie Allen and Annie Burke to keep the legacy of Pomo Basketry alive. The opening reception will feature speakers from the local Pomo community including: Elsie Allen’s granddaughter, Linda Aguilar, and Allen’s niece Susan Billy, who learned basket weaving from Allen and had a special relationship with her. Silver Galleto, founder of the Pomo Weaver’s Society is guest curating this event with Museum Supervisor/Curator Rachel Minor and will also give remarks. A Pomo blessing and song will precede the event.
Other events in support of the exhibition include two screenings of a documentary film on Pomo basket weavers on March 7 and 15, and on March 10, a panel discussion with local members of the Pomo Weavers Society. Finally, on March 29, Clint McKay—a weaver descended from several of the artists represented in the Elsie Allen collection—will visit the campus in order to demonstrate Pomo basket weaving techniques.
The exhibit opens on March 3, 2023 with a reception from 4 to 7pm, and will be displayed until Friday, December 22. Regular museum hours are Monday 11 am – 3 pm and Tuesday – Saturday 10 am – 3 pm.
For detailed information and to RSVP for any of the events, please visit: https://museum.santarosa.edu/breaking-traditions-saving-traditions
