Laotian weaver Bounxou Daoheuang Chanthraphone was speechless when she was told she had gotten a $100,000 award from the Bush Foundation. Then she "got tears in her eyes," said her daughter, Laddavan Insixiengmay.
The foundation presented three of its "Enduring Vision" awards -- said to be the nation's largest for older artists -- Monday at Minneapolis' Central Library. Other recipients: Minneapolis photographer Paul Shambroom, and Lakota artist and art historian Arthur Amiotte of Custer, S.D.
An expert in traditional Laotian spinning and weaving, Chanthraphone (pronounced SHAN-thra-phone), 62, of Brooklyn Park, relied on her skills after war ravaged their homeland in the 1970s. She disguised herself as a fisherman and her daughter as a boy, and escaped the violence by rowing across the Mekong River to Thailand.
At a refugee camp she taught weaving to other refugees, sold their products to visiting dignitaries and helped build a school for the camp's children. She was so successful at creating an illusion of normalcy that her daughter didn't realize they were refugees until years later when she read about the war in a history class in the United States.
After immigrating to the United States in 1982, Chanthraphone continued teaching and weaving. In 2000 she received a National Heritage Fellowship Award, the highest honor in folk art, from the National Endowment for the Arts.
She plans to use the Bush money to produce, in English and Lao, the first-ever book about traditional Lao weaving and her own designs.
"She feels she's getting old and this would be her gift to the world before leaving this world. She's quite frank about that," said Insixiengmay. "Our culture passes the traditions through memorization so she wants to put it into something you can touch and see, not just Lao people but everybody."
The other winners
