Artist's Biography

Artist Elizabeth James Perry
(photo courtesy of Jeanette Vanderhoop)

Aquinnah Wampanoag/Eastern Band Cherokee artist Elizabeth James-Perry draws inspiration for her hand-sculpted geometric pendants, animal effigies, and disc beads from the rich, early-Contact Period of Eastern Woodland material culture. She has practiced traditional weaving, wampum and beadwork since early childhood, having learned from family, the larger Native community and her own historical research.

Upcoming Exhibitions

Elizabeth James-Perry will be attending the Native Artisan Festival on Marthas Vineyard July 25th, 2009.

In 2008 the artist designed a Native Textiles project. The plan, made possible with funding from the New England Foundation for the Arts, entails creating small hand-woven samplers that illustrate some of the many forms of weaving employed by Wampanoag people.

Prior Exhibitions

For the past fifteen years, Elizabeth's native weavings, basketry, and jewelry have been exhibited at the Heritage Museum and Plantation, the Fuller Museum of Art, Plimoth Plantation Museum, the Heard Museum Guild Market, and the Eiteljorg Museum Indian Art Market.

Wampanoag eel trap

In 2003, at the Northwest Folklife Festival in Seattle, Washington, Elizabeth created an ash and cedar eel trap, for the theme East Meets West: Maritime Culture of the Atlantic Northeast and Pacific Northwest; she was a textile artist-in-residence with artists from Kodiak Island and Hawaii during the 2004-2005 ECHO Tradewinds program at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Most recently, Elizabeth shared the art of willow-work at her communities' new museum, the Indigenous Museum of the Aquinnah Wampanoag, situated near the multi-colored clay cliffs of Martha's Vineyard Island.

Cultural Projects

Elizabeth shares her knowledge of coastal Algonquian culture and oral traditions through writing and storytelling; the artist has recounted her families' whaling history for the radio program The Telling Takes Us Home. In 2007 she presented collaborative textile research about a rare belt labeled the "King Philips Sash" at the annual American Indian Workshop in Europe. Elizabeth attended the Rhode Island School of Design and also holds a degree in Marine Biology.