November 30, noon, University Museum—Lowcountry Black Women as Culture Makers and Entrepreneurs,  a brown bag lecture by Deirdre Cooper Owens, UM professor of history, will be offered in conjunction with the exhibition, “Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art.”

“Grass Roots” showcases baskets from the low country of South Carolina and Georgia, as well as from diverse regions of Africa. The exhibition traces the story of coiled basketry from the domestication of rice in Africa through the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Carolina rice plantations and into the present. The exhibition also features basket-making tools and historic rice cultivation artifacts, and shows how the market basket can be viewed simultaneously as a work of art, object of use and container of memory.