* *
- When Tina Fung Holder goes for a walk,
there's always a chance
some part of nature will come home with her.
- See, that's all the sweetgrass there.
It's just amazing to me that people would not be curious,
when they walk along because every single thing out there,
I'm curious about.
This would be a beautiful red stroke,
just begging to have me put it into a work of art.
- Once inside her apartment,
dried sweetgrass is braided into cordage.
Red osier dogwood is bent into a frame.
And soon the most malleable parts of nature
take new shape and find new purpose.
- As I look around, like, anything that bends to me,
that's going to end up in some kind of basketry thing, you know.
* *
- Tina is a lot like her material:
flexible and open to new possibilities.
- Where I was born, when I was born,
everything had to be made by hand.
- Tina was born in what was then British Guiana,
a British colony in South America.
She was one of the youngest in a large family,
and taught herself how to sew her doll's clothes
and to make fish scale necklaces to sell to tourists.
- Stuff like that was always -- I was always making.
I think my Dad secretly, always admired it -
creative brain of a child -
[chuckles]
'cause he was a mechanical kind of person.
He was an engineer.
My mother was the type that said,
"Get educated so you can earn your living.
You don't have ask a man for money."
- By 1969, Guiana had declared its independence.
And most of Tina's siblings had moved to America or England.
Tina landed in Chicago, living with a sister.
- She said, "You know, there's classes down at the art museum, I think."
This is where they say ignorance is bliss
'cause I had no idea this was the top art school.
- She talked her way into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Soon she was working at the Field Museum,
doing repairs on artifacts
and putting on exhibits for the public.
- What I'm doing mostly has to do with going to art school
and going spending hours and hours at the Field Museum.
- It was there that Tina's openness
led her to a new purpose: working with children.
- You want to make another duck?
Ok, we'll make another duck.
Do you remember the over-the-finger knot?
- That's when I got a really understand
that ability I have to communicate with kids.
- Tina says adults can be quick to close off possibilities.
- All I'm hearing is, "Oh, this is so --
"I didn t know it was so hard.
I was never artistic."
- Tina says children are like her weaving material, malleable.
- When you throw it at them,
they don't know that it's a hard thing.
They do it. They follow you.
- Tina!
- I'm here.
- After art school, new opportunities kept finding her,
as photographers in the advertising business
hired her to make props for their photo shoots.
- He says, "Don't sell yourself short.
This is big time."
Well, I didn't even have TV in the country when I left.
So, I have no idea what big time means.
[chuckles]
- Tina worked on some of the most iconic advertising projects
of the 70s and 80s.
- So, I did his little shirt.
This is what you get.
Three o'clock in the morning,
I'm making stuff for Morris the Cat.
I made his little Valentine thing.
So little by little, I built up this whole, whole career.
Just freelancing in advertising.
So that's why sometimes -- I always say,
"I haven't any idea how I got here.
Why I got here."
But then I see how these things connect up.
You see something?
- Her advertising career indirectly led Tina
to northern Wisconsin and the City of Washburn.
- Well I met this, this assistant photographer.
We traveled around the Great Lakes area
and ended up here in the peninsula.
Oh yeah, this would work just fine.
This was perfect for me.
I grew up in our culture of a village raising a child.
I bet you know what to do 'cause you know what?
I saw you got a little, quack quack beak there.
- She's still shaping malleable things: baskets and children.
- The satisfaction for me is to see the delight on their face.
Well, that's how you tie it all together.
This is something I have in me
to give to the next generations, you know?
And that's how the whole thing started.