Mount Pleasant, South Carolina
Henrietta Snype is a master sweetgrass basket weaver, lecturer, and tradition-bearer carrying forward a Gullah Geechee craft that traces back, in her own words, "since before the Middle Passage."
Who She Is
A native of Mount Pleasant, Henrietta learned to weave at age seven from her mother Mary Mazyck and her grandmother Elizabeth C. Johnson. She is a founding member of the Sweetgrass Basket Makers Association and a 2018 recipient of the Jean Laney Harris Folk Heritage Award from the South Carolina Arts Commission. Her work has lived in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the McKissick Museum, and the Henry Ford Museum.
Forms that go from working rice-field tools to wall-hung art, woven from sweetgrass, palmetto, bulrush, and pine needle.
Explore →A 300-year story of survival, skill, and adaptation, kept alive by the Gullah Geechee people from the Carolinas to Florida.
Read the history →Three decades of K–12 visits, university lectures, and public demonstrations from Charleston to Jacksonville to Minneapolis.
Book Henrietta →"I have to take this on a different journey — not just because I want to make a dollar here or there. I want to be able to preserve this. If we don't teach it to our children — because I consider myself in the middle generation — then there is not another generation." — Henrietta Snype
Featured Work
From a quintessential rice fanner to small bread baskets and sweetgrass jewelry — each piece is coiled, sewn, and finished by hand.
Latest News
A hands-on workshop with Charleston's beloved master weaver — recurring at Drayton Hall.
Read more →Henrietta's work lives in Mia's period-room installation telling the story of Lowcountry rice cultivation.
Read more →Henrietta on the rice fanner: "Charleston was a place that grew a lot of rice."
Read more →