Oneida artist Liandra Skenandore awarded 2026 Native Arts + Cultures Foundation LIFT Award

Basketmaker, researcher and educator Liandra Skenandore (Oneida Nation) is one of fifteen recipients of the Native Arts + Cultures Foundation (NACF)’s 2026 LIFT – Early Career Support for Native Artists award.

Skenandore centers her practice on creating, researching, and teaching Oneida and Haudenosaunee black ash utility basketry.

The LIFT award provides early career Native artists with professional development, marketing support, culturally appropriate evaluation and a $15,000 award to develop and realize new projects.

Through their projects, these artists will address critical issues such as cultural sovereignty, environmental and social justice, healing and well-being and systemic change.

Skenandore was selected from NACF’s largest applicant pool to date.

Skenandore helps harvest black ash logs, hand-processes each splint with minimal tools and free-form weaves one-of-a-kind baskets that reflect a deep connection to the land and her cultural traditions.

Her research draws on historical records, museum collections and the knowledge of fellow weavers and community members to better understand traditional basket forms. These insights inform both her artistic practice and her teaching within the community.

Through this work, Skenandore honors the legacy of ancestor weavers, the relationship her people have with the black ash tree and the well-being of future generations by helping keep traditional baskets alive.

In 2020, Skenandore apprenticed with renowned black ash weaver April Stone (Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa) through the NACF Mentor Artist Fellowship.

That experience inspired her to teach traditional utility basketry, reintroducing these forms into Oneida lifeways, strengthening community basketmaking traditions and deepening relationships with the black ash tree and the teachings and healing kahuwe·yá̱ offers.

Her work has been supported by a Minnesota Historical Society Encouragement Artist Grant and the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums’ Native Craft Artist Readiness Program.

Her baskets have been featured in exhibitions at the Neville Public Museum and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Her work is also held in the collections of the Kahnekano·lú Cultural Center, Oneida Community Library, and Milwaukee Public Museum.

Skenandore’s LIFT project, Ash-scapes: A Reimagining of the Black Ash Landscape, is a new body of woven black ash panels that will feature “ash paint,” paint made from the burned ashes of black ash trees affected by the emerald ash borer.

These woven panels turned canvases will reimagine what the emerald ash borer devastation can mean.

Knowing the loss of black ash trees and the uncertainty about the future of black ash basketweaving, Ash-scapes will offer a new imagining and deeper feeling of how we can still be in relation to kahuwe·yá̱.

The project will be shared with the community through a public presentation and an ash paint-making workshop.

“Receiving a LIFT award means I get to deepen my practice as a black ash weaver and have the support to create a new body of work that I’ve been envisioning for some time now. Our landscapes are changing rapidly, and I feel very compelled to create these weavings as a way to express what I’m seeing and feeling about what’s happening to our trees. My work has previously focused on traditional Oneida utility baskets; this new body of work will be more abstract and really expand on what the material can do in making meaning and how we can further tell our stories,” Skenandore said.