Mary Jackson

Mary Jackson grew up in Mount Pleasant, a small community in the South Carolina low country, an area rich in West African heritage. Slaves imported to the rice-growing region brought with them a language, Gullah, and great skill in making baskets that were put to a variety of uses by the plantation owners. When Jackson was about 4, her mother and grandmother began teaching her to make baskets. As a child, she also learned to harvest the plants, primarily sweetgrass, used in their construction. During the summer, she and her siblings and cousins gathered under big trees in her grandmother’s yard and wove baskets, though Jackson initially found the task drudgery. After graduating from high school, she lived in New York City for about ten years, but on trips home she continued making baskets with family members.

When she returned to Mount Pleasant to live in 1972, Jackson learned from family members that the sweetgrass used in baskets was disappearing. Through Jackson’s job at a Charleston community center, she made contact with a priest who got permission from landowners to harvest sweetgrass on land slated for development. Today, she works to preserve wetlands where sweetgrass grows and to ensure continued local access. In 2008, she received the Environmental Stewardship Award of Achievement from the South Carolina Aquarium.

In the 1970s, while continuing to create baskets from traditional designs, Jackson began to create her own. Late in that decade, she began to get commissions for baskets. After she quit work to take care of her asthmatic son, she began selling baskets on weekends at the city market in nearby Charleston, a practice that had begun decades before. “Women sold baskets along the roadside in the community where I grew up along Highway 17,” Jackson said. “Travelers who traveled from Maine to Florida would see stands sitting on the roadside with baskets. And they were sold in the city market. My grandmothers used to sell their baskets, sometimes in the city market with their vegetables. So a whole new attention was coming to this art form. But I also wanted to bring my work into the art world where it had never been seen before.” She achieved this goal as well. After she sold her baskets at the Smithsonian Craft Show in Washington, D.C., in 1984, she began to develop a national reputation and her work was displayed in art galleries in major cities. In 1988, she was involved in the founding of the Mount Pleasant Sweetgrass Basket Makers Association.

Jackson now lives on Johns Island, south of Charleston, where she works in a studio a few miles from her home. Her husband and son gather sweetgrass from the local marshes, and her daughter, whom Jackson taught to make baskets, provides administrative support. In 2008, Jackson received the USA Donnelly Fellowship, which includes a $50,000 stipend. Three days later, she learned that she had been awarded the $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship, sometimes called the “genius grant.”

Among Jackson’s students is her granddaughter, now a young teenager. “I’ve passed it on, and I’m continuing to pass it on,” Jackson said. “Sometimes I get invitations to do a workshop in different communities. And so, I take time out sometimes to do that, even at a crafts school. People are learning more and more about it.”