Amanda Crowe

Amanda Crowe is one of the most important carvers of the Eastern band of Cherokee. Best known for her carvings of bears, Crowe’s artistic character is both rooted in her Cherokee heritage and her formal art education. From a young age, Crowe showed promise in the arts and learned from her uncle, Goingback Chiltoskey, a famed Cherokee carver whose work is in the Collection of the Asheville Art Museum. Maintaining the traditional Cherokee material and form, she was known to work in cherry, buckeye, mahagony, and walnut.

In 1946, she was awarded a scholarship to attend the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her Master of Fine Arts. In 1952, she was awarded a John Quincy Adams Fellowship to attend the Instituto Allende in San Miguel, Mexico for ten months and study sculpture with José Mariano de Creeft. Funded by the Cherokee Historical Association, she returned to North Carolina to teach woodcarving at the Cherokee high school for the next 40 years, all while maintaining a studio in Painttown. During her tenure, she trained artists Virgil Ledford, Lloyd Carl Owle, John Wilnoty, and Bud Smith, among others. Josh Adams, whose work is in the Collection, currently leads the woodshop at the Cherokee High School.

Before Crowe and her prolific teaching legacy, carving was a male-dominated tradition. Facing both social challenges and the challenges of the material, Crowe disseminated her methods in the classroom, through the sale of carving kits and instructions, and through her writing. In 1980, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and became a Life Member of the Southern Highland Craft Guild. She received the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award in 2000.

Her work is held in the Collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the Bureau of Indian Affairs Museum, and the Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual permanent collection. Her work has been shown at the High Museum of Art and the Mint Museum.