LONG BEACH, CA.- In conjunction with California Landscapes, an exhibition featuring over 75 paintings spanning the period 1904 to 2004, the Long Beach Museum of Art presents an exciting and thought-provoking selection of contemporary baskets. Organized by Museum Director Harold B. Nelson, a specialist in contemporary craft and the decorative arts, Engaging Nature includes over thirty-five baskets made by fourteen contemporary artists living in this country and Japan. All works in Engaging Nature are on loan from the extraordinary Los Angeles-based collection of Lloyd and Margit Cotsen.

Baskets – useful containers made from interwoven natural or man-made materials – have been in existence since the dawn of time. Virtually every culture throughout the world has made baskets and used them to carry, contain, trap, bind, capture, sort, support, separate and shelter a wide variety of animate and inanimate objects. Over the past thirty years, artists have begun to explore the basket as an object of beauty, a sculptural form, or as a vehicle for self-_expression and formal experimentation. Through their explorations, artists have taken this simple utilitarian object to the level of a fine art. By using materials such as grass, straw, flax, reed, tree bark, cork, burl, bamboo and willow, contemporary artists have also explored basketmaking as a means of engaging nature in an intimate, creative dialogue.

The artists featured in Engaging Nature celebrate nature as both subject and medium, and offer a new and highly inventive interpretation of “landscape.” Engaging Nature features work by many of the leading figures in the field of contemporary basketry, including Dorothy Gill Barnes, Nancy Moore Bess, Brent Brown, Lillian Elliott, Pat Hickman, Mary Giles, Gyongy Laky, John McQueen, Doris Messick, Leon Niehues, Ed Rossbach, Hisako Sekijima, Carol Shaw-Sutton and Billie Ruth Sudduth. Engaging Nature, the first exhibition organized by the Long Beach Museum of Art to survey this important field, advances the Museum’s commitment to contemporary craft.