Billie Ruth Sudduth

Billie Ruth Sudduth, whose workshop will be held in September, also lives in Bakersville, where she spends more than 10 hours a day in her studio making, collecting and writing about baskets. She has been doing so since 1989, when she left a career of almost 20 years as a school psychologist. Her studio is known as JABOBS, an acronym for “Just a Bunch of Baskets.”

One distinctive feature of her baskets is that the spiral designs for many of them are mathematically derived, using numbers and ratios discovered by a 13th Century Italian mathematician named Fibonacci. The same mathematical principles have been followed by artists through the centuries, including Michelangelo, Bela Bartok, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Sudduth’s baskets are now in the collections of the Renwick Gallery in Washington; the Museum of Art and Design in New York; the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Art in Racine, Wisconsin.; the Mint Museum of Craft and Design in Charlotte; the Asheville Art Museum; and the Montgomery, Alabama Museum of Fine Arts.

In 1997, she was designated a “North Carolina Living Treasure,” the state’s highest honor for creative excellence in crafts. HandMade in America’s the Craft Heritage Trails of Western North Carolina describes her studio, JABOBS, as “a one-woman epicenter of classically proportioned basketry.”

Sudduth’s program will be available to persons with basic basket making skills and others with weaving experience, such as fiber artists, who wish to expand into another artisan area. Examples of Sudduth’s work can be viewed at www.brsbasket.com.