The passing of John McQueen in midsummer 2025 made me look back over the strong impact he has had on me and other artists, an impact that has never weakened. In my early days, I learned a lot from both his art work and articulate statements in teaching. Writing this remembrance has replaced my grief with my refreshed excitement of those days. In it I also want to convey deep regret about his passing from other Japanese basketmakers who studied in his courses.
As a tribute, I have included an illustration of his workshop at Peter’s Valley Craft Center in 1978, from my book Formula for Basketry. It was republished last year, 36 years after its original in which I discussed my 10-year artistic exploration, starting with problems thrown at basketmakers by McQueen.
Twelve participants of his course, including myself, triumphantly carried a group project, a big basket like a geodesic dome, on the top of a car to the auction site of the Craft Center. Requiring us to put it upside down, I now realize, symbolized very well his intent to throw us all outside of the conventions of basketmaking. At that time I lived in suburban New York City and was anxious to take his course. His Untitled Basket overwhelmed me with beautiful forms made of low processed plant materials with totally original structural mechanisms. I had visited exhibitions to see his work at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts and galleries including Hadler/Rodriguez, Florence Duhl, and Helen Drutt.
I never became a participant of one of his workshops again after Peter’s Valley, because while there, John McQueen gave me a basketful of homework that put me on a lifetime path of extremely experimental exploration. After returning to Japan in 1979, I enthusiastically set up his workshops as a planner, adviser, and assistant or interpret/moderator, in order to introduce a Japanese audience and my students to the fascinating gateway to the basket world that John McQueen was discovering.
In 1978, John McQueen’s work was exhibited for the first time in Japan in a survey show of contemporary textile arts from Europe, America, and Japan (Part I: Fiber Works – Europe, Japan; Part II: Fiber Works – Americas, Japan). It was curated by Shigeki Fukunaga as a two-part series in 1977 and 1978 for the Museums of Modern Art in Kyoto and Tokyo. The next time McQueen’s work was exhibited in Japan was in 1989 in an exhibition of American contemporary crafts entitled The Eloquent Object which started at Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa Oklahoma and travelled to the Museums of Modern Art in New York, Kyoto, and Tokyo. In those years in Japan, contemporary basketmaking had just started attracting a few weavers’ attention. In narrower circles, those who knew more about contemporary baskets as new art forms through slides or publications I brought back from America and through John McQueen’s early innovative work were intoxicated by the vast possibility of asserting modes of sculptural basketmaking.
In the winter of 1997, I planned, with Kazue Homma, basketmaker and publisher of a mini-circulation for basketmakers, to invite John McQueen to Japan. We set up a series of events within his one-month stay: in Tokyo two-day workshop with a slide lecture, a slide lecture at Gallery Isogaya, and a joint lecture for three art schools. In Kyoto, he would conduct a 5-day workshop at Kawashima Textile School.
For Kyoto, I scheduled his course in place of a basketry course in the school’s “Hands Week” program that was scheduled annually. I had been teaching a one-week basketry course for 15 years before then. I intentionally planned his teaching to be not too conceptual but quite technical, in consideration of the preference of Japanese participants. Even so, McQueen’s method was so extraordinary and innovative that all were intrigued or taken out of their conventional thinking. For example, he taught how to transfer a vessel form step-by-step into a two-dimensional template, which was necessary for his signature method of “weaving a basket on the loom.” Just the idea shocked all in Japan, where good baskets ought to be made of stiff bamboo or akebia without any mold or shaping gears!!
In Tokyo, McQueen’s course was filled instantly with 20 participants, mostly fellow artists and ex-students of mine. We financed his air fare by the admission costs paid a month ahead to reserve entry. When he showed how to join patches of tree bark, everyone was very pleased, as well as surprised, that he generously shared this technical secret. But, as Kazue Homma, wrote in her report of his workshop in Basketry News, “Being taught has two sides. A taught way would better be avoided, though the teacher said taking someone’s way is not always bad.” She noted that he added “one’s own original [way] is much more difficult and so valuable.” One year after the workshops, participants of both venues had a group show John McQueen was there at Sembikiya Gallery in Tokyo to show each breakthrough.
In 1999, the Yokohama Art Museum presented Weaving the World: Contemporary Arts of Linear lConstruction. The curator, Hideko Numata, invited John McQueen and Margo Mensing for a joint workshop. (Hideko Numata’s recollection will appear in an upcoming arttextstyle.) During that trip, I joined McQueen and Mensing for a three-day joint workshop at Sapporo Art Park in Hokkaido. It was organized by the Art Park in collaboration with the Hokkaido branch of Kawashima Textile School’s alumni. Participants, mostly experienced weavers, had a choice of three projects: McQueen’s “stick project,” Mensing’s three-dimensional knitting, and my material transformation. Stick project, being well received in other workshops, was what can be called a portraying of a soft object in short, straight, linear materials: composing a free-standing new object with use of short sticks and other items in combination. What he explained to participants was that they should be conscious of portraying a certain aspect of the object, which he said was to be the subject of a new object. It was a very new experience to Japanese weavers. For them, making an object with a concrete subject was not familiar, because until then, more emotional or impressionistic expression had been preferred. This project, I think, reflected very well the new direction of his work which seemed getting more figurative and narrative year after year.
McQueen was a great educator in that he showed us “unlearning is a true learning.” I would like to say thank you and good bye to him with a following story. In the workshop at Kawashima Textile School I saw him teaching plaiting by aligning components on the edge at the beginning, but not on the bottom. He reversed the common procedure most basketry books take as basic. Everyone got “his new basic.” The reversed process made them give up the convention. I realized that John’s teaching skill had advanced since the time I studied with him at Peter’s Valley, in that he came to teach it from much more elemental point. He taught us in 1978 to start from the bottom, a conventional way. In due course, I got fixed in its convention. It took years to liberate myself from the basket “trap” until eventually I came to “discover” an approach based on reversed engineering on my own!! Looking at this, I got another priceless lesson from McQueen: “Do not take for granted someone else’s basics.”
This is how I shall remember him always.
Hisako Sekijima
Yokohama, Japan