Beloved friends of the museum are being honored as recipients of the North Carolina Heritage Award this year on June 7th. You can purchase tickets and read the full article from the original post at https://www.ncarts.org/blog/2025/01/09/meet-recipients-2025-north-carolina-heritage-awards
“Since 1989, the North Carolina Heritage Awards have honored artists statewide for their contributions to the cultural lives of their communities. The Folklife program of the North Carolina Arts Council is pleased to announce the five artists/groups who will be presented with the 2025 awards on June 7, at a public ceremony in Raleigh.”
About Loretta & Herman
A lovely section was written in the original link so we will share it here:
“Born and raised in Robeson County, the culture keepers and artisans Herman Oxendine and his late wife, Loretta, spent their adult lives teaching and encouraging the revival of traditional Lumbee arts and knowledge. Loretta died on October 6, 2024, shortly after learning of her Heritage Award. Herman is known primarily for his pottery, which he hand-builds using the coil method and traditionally fires, following the teachings of other American Indian potters in this state, such as the Haliwa-Saponi artist Senora Lynch and Catawba Nation master potter Nola Campbell. In his home studio, in Pembroke, Herman can also be found carving gourds and wooden bowls, painting, weaving corn-husk baskets, and making jewelry from chinaberries. Loretta was renowned for her pine needle baskets, which she learned to make at the age of eight by watching her older sister and her mother. Loretta went on to lead a revival of pine needle basketmaking among members of the Lumbee Tribe in North Carolina, teaching and demonstrating across the state and inspiring a new generation of artisans. The needles of the longleaf pine fall from the trees in July. Loretta would gather them, stitch them together with tobacco twine, and adorn the finished product with chinaberries. Such baskets traditionally hold domestic items like sewing notions, beans, or seeds. She and Herman innovated on the form by weaving longleaf pine needles into hats that have been worn by Lumbee luminaries such as Chief Harvey Godwin, Jr. and American Idol contestant Alexis Raeana. With Arvis Boughman, Loretta was the co-author of the book Herbal Remedies of the Lumbee Indians. In 2004, pottery by Herman and a pine needle basket by Loretta were part of a display at the National Museum of the American Indian, in Washington, D.C. Loretta’s work has been collected by the Peabody Museum, in Boston; the Guilford Native American Art Gallery, in Greensboro; and the N.C. Museum of History, in Raleigh.”