'Basket Maker' coming to Trickster Gallery

An artist has been commissioned to build a large bronze statue of an American Indian woman outside the Trickster Gallery by the end of the year.

"Heart of the Basket Maker," by New Mexico sculptor Cliff Fragua, will stand eight feet tall outside the American Indian art gallery, facing the Town Square shopping center at Schaumburg and Roselle roads.

The $75,000 piece is to be funded by Schaumburg's 1 Percent for the Arts program, which allocates approximately 1 percent of the village's annual capital improvements budget to bringing new, original art to the community.

Fragua's "Heart of the Basket Maker" was selected from a pool of 25 submissions of American Indian-influenced sculptures, juried by the 1 Percent for the Arts Committee and the Trickster Gallery's board of directors.

"We wanted to promote that center, and to promote the American Indian presence in the community," Todd Wenger, the village's landscape planner and an adviser to the 1 Percent for the Arts Committee, said of the decision to put a sculpture outside the Trickster Gallery.

According to Fragua, the sculpture depicts a Pueblo woman emerging from a swirl at the base, where a basket sits. The selection jury liked the initial design but felt it was specific to Southwest American Indian culture, Wenger said. Fragua agreed to redesign the headpiece with motifs of a variety of other tribes across America. The revised headpiece design includes tribal symbols of Plains, Navajo, Woodlands, Pawnee, Pueblo, Salishan and Cherokee American Indians.

http://www.pioneerlocal.com/schaumburg/news/1106857,sc-sculpture-062608-s1.article