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Hannah Ryggen (1894–1970) was a Swedish-Norwegian modern artist who began her career as a painter before switching to creating political art in the form of monumental tapestries. Combining the decorative and the political, Ryggen was ahead of her time with her turn to “political weaving.” She was also a feminist with strong communist sympathies involved in the international workers’ movement. Her dramatic, beautiful tapestries were shown at both the Paris and Brussels World’s Fairs, but she was largely forgotten by the international art world in the decades after her death. In recent years, however, as interest in both fiber arts and pioneering women artists has grown, Ryggen’s work has returned to the public eye, with major international exhibitions and fresh attention from curators, collectors, and critics.

A widely recognized authority on Ryggen, Marit Paasche brings this important Scandinavian artist to the foreground in this biography, the first published on Ryggen in English. Paasche looks at Ryggen within the social, political, and cultural contexts of her time and explores how these issues informed her work, from her anti-fascist tapestry that depicted a spear piercing Mussolini’s head to one protesting the war in Vietnam. Published to correspond with a major retrospective in Frankfurt, of which Paasche is one of the curators, Hannah Ryggen is a foundational book that will provide a crucial introduction of this artist to a broader audience.
 

 The Southern Paiute and Chemehuevi people have lived for countless generations in the southern Great Basin of western North America in a homeland that extends to parts of Utah, Nevada, California, and northern Arizona. Referred to by a variety of names and spellings in the Euro­American literature, they are the people whose name for themselves is “Nuwu”—or collectively, “Nuwuvi.” Nuwuvi basket weaving is a traditional and evolving art form that connects weavers to their ancestors and to the natural world.
            This publication, years in the making, includes chapters by Catherine S. Fowler, Judith W. Finger, John J. Kania, and Larry Dalrymple that explore the cultural history of the Nuwuvi people, the work of known weavers, and the characteristics and development of Nuwuvi basketry from the 1870s to 2022. It focuses particularly on the fine-coiled work produced during the American Arts and Crafts Movement period of the 1890s to 1930s. Working separately and together, the authors analyzed over 1,200 baskets in museum collections across the United States, from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., to the Lost City Museum in Henderson, Nevada. They researched the baskets’ collectors—from John Wesley Powell to Helen J. Stewart and Isabel T. Kelly—and conducted interviews with contemporary weavers. In order to give the reader as broad a visual understanding of Nuwuvi coiled baskets as possible, images of baskets from the collection of Judith and Andrew Finger are included. The book is lavishly illustrated with archival and contemporary photographs.

It’s the 1960s. The Vietnam War is raging and protests are erupting across the United States. In many quarters, young people are dropping out of society, leaving their urban homes behind in an attempt to find a safe place to live on their own terms, to grow their own food, and to avoid a war they passionately decry. During this time, West Virginia becomes a haven for thousands of these homesteaders—or back-to-the-landers, as they are termed by some. Others call them hippies.

When the going got rough, many left. But a significant number remain to this day. Some were artisans when they arrived, while others adopted a craft that provided them with the cash necessary to survive. Hippie Homesteaders tells the story of this movement from the viewpoint of forty artisans and musicians who came to the state, lived on the land, and created successful careers with their craft. There’s the couple that made baskets coveted by the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery. There’s the draft-dodger that fled to Canada and then became a premier furniture maker. There’s the Boston-born VISTA worker who started a quilting cooperative. And, there’s the immigrant Chinese potter who lived on a commune.

Along with these stories, Hippie Homesteaders examines the serendipitous timing of this influx and the community and economic support these crafters received from residents and state agencies in West Virginia. Without these young transplants, it’s possible there would be no Tamarack: The Best of West Virginia, the first statewide collection of fine arts and handcrafts in the nation, and no Mountain Stage, the weekly live musical program broadcast worldwide on National Public Radio since 1983. Forget what you know about West Virginia.

Hippie Homesteaders isn’t about coal or hillbillies or moonshine or poverty. It is the story of why West Virginia was—and still is—a kind of heaven to so many.