Pat Courtney Gold

Pat Courtney Gold (January 22, 1939 – July 11, 2022) was a Wasco Native fiber artist and basket weaver from the Columbia River area of Oregon. Her pieces often reflected the natural world along the Columbia River, mixing traditional motifs such as condors and sturgeon with contemporary elements like airplanes. Gold also became an environmental and cultural educator, helping to spread knowledge of her ancestral heritage and basketry skills.

Career Gold's art is exhibited in museums around the world, including the High Desert Museum, Royal British Columbia Museum, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University and Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.

In 1991, through the Oregon Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program, Gold began to study the making of "sally bags," flexible cylindrical baskets created by Wasco-Wishram people for gathering roots and medicines, as well as nuts, seeds and mushrooms. Gold diagrammed historical basket designs and learned about the stories they told, encompassing the symbolism of fishing nets, petroglyphs and other ancestral scenes.

Personal life Pat Courtney was born and raised on the Warm Springs Reservation in central Oregon. Her mother was an accomplished beadworker, and they would visit local art museums where their ancestors' baskets were on display.

She enrolled at Whitman College, graduating in 1961 with a B.A. in mathematics and physics. She married a Portland State University mathematics professor, Phillip Gold. The couple lived in Scappoose, Oregon. Gold worked as a mathematician-computer specialist for nearly 17 years before beginning her career in basket weaving. She earned a Community Spirit Award in 2003 and Cultural Capital Fellowship in 2004 from the First People's Fund.

Gold was a recipient of a 2007 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.

Published works