The Artistry of Her Baskets Is Complex. So Is the Story Around Them.

A couple recognized the Washoe weaver Louisa Keyser’s prodigious talent and spun myths to promote it. But her fortitude shines in work that today can be seen in museums and at the Independent 20th Century fair.

A portrait of Louisa Keyser, the most famous Washoe basket maker, who helped transform a utilitarian craft to fine art and was promoted at the time as a “princess” by a couple who sold her work. Donald Ellis Gallery

The Native American baskets sold in the early 1900s out of Abe Cohn’s Emporium, a men’s clothing store in Carson City, Nev., were exceptional. They were woven by Dat So La Lee, said to be a “princess” from the nearby Washoe people whose royal status permitted her alone to utilize a special weaving style.

The truth was less exciting. Dat So La Lee preferred her English name, Louisa Keyser. She was a Washoe woman, but the tales Cohn and his wife, Amy, spun about her — her esteemed heritage, her meeting with the Civil War general John C. Frémont — were myths.

As for many of her baskets’ distinctive and lovely incurving bulge, known as degikup, it almost certainly was influenced by the baskets of a different people, the Maidu, much as the fine stitching of Keyser’s work was lightly derived from the baskets of yet another Native American people, the Pomo. Nothing lent Keyser special authority to make her baskets her way.

“Interchange and borrowing was common in the production of baskets for the curio trade,” Marvin S. Cohodas, a professor emeritus of art history at the University of British Columbia who wrote an essay about Keyser accompanying the show, said in an email.

The Cohns originally hired Keyser to be their washerwoman, according to Cohodas. The Cohns noticed her skill — she may have begun by twining around Abe’s whiskey flasks — and backed her financially in exchange for her exclusive weaving services (she no longer had to clean for them).

The Cohns fashioned their apocryphal embellishments as the baskets’ extraordinary artistic value became apparent. They also arranged for her to weave outdoors or, during winter, in the Emporium window; at least once, Amy Cohn lectured while Keyser posed near her.

No matter their back story, Keyser’s baskets sold well and today are considered remarkable. They can be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art…