Passionate about the legacy of her artform, master craftswoman and basket maker Jery Bennett Taylor (b.1953) has been honoring her Gullah Geechee heritage for almost seven decades.

The Gullah Geechee people are descendants of West and Central Africans who were enslaved and bought to the lower Atlantic states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia to work on the coastal rice, indigo and Sea Island cotton plantations. In 2006, the National Park Service designated a Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor to call attention to the historic and cultural contributions of the Gullah Geechee people and their descendants, explaining that “because their enslavement was on isolated coastal plantations, sea and barrier islands, they were able to retain many of their indigenous Af

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