Micah Wiles creates intricate, impeccable baskets from split white oak, often sourcing and preparing the materials himself on his 100-acre family farm in Pulaski County, Kentucky.
The artist and farmer has been making baskets for over a decade, continuing a fiber-art legacy that has become closely associated with Appalachian and south-central Kentucky craft in recent decades despite its Old World roots.
Noting the abundance of white oak in Appalachian forests, early European settlers brought the practice of weaving sturdy totes out of tough hardwood splints to America; generations of local families and farmers kept the practice alive. (While Indigenous makers wove with white oak, they primarily worked with plentiful rivercane grass.)
During the 20th-century Craft Revival, white-oak baskets became popular souvenirs for tourists visiting Kentucky’s Cave Country, inadvertently making the craft synonymous with the region. Family-owned roadside stands selling the baskets proliferated around Mammoth Cave National Park, but the construction of Interstate 65 in the 1960s reduced traffic and, with it, basket sales; additional environmental and economic factors in the years since have caused the number of Kentucky basket makers to wane.
Micah Wiles demonstrates white-oak basket weaving to a student.
