Kelly Church
Native American basketry artist and educator (b. 1967)
Kelly Jean Church (Match-e-benash-she-wish Potawatomi/Odawa/Ojibwe) is a black ash basket maker, Woodlands style painter, birchbark biter, and educator. She lives in Michigan.
Background
Kelly Jean Church, a fifth-generation basket maker, was born in 1967. She grew up in southwestern Michigan. Her mother is of English and Irish heritage, and her father is of Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe heritage. Church studied the Odawa language from her paternal grandmother and learned black ash basketry from her father, Bill Church, and cousin, John Pigeon. She, in turn, has taught her daughter, Cherish Parrish (Gun Lake Band Potawatomi).
Church has completed an AFA degree at the Institute of American Indian Studies and a BFA degree at the University of Michigan.
Artwork
Basketry
Along with her family, Church harvests her own trees in swampy areas of rural Michigan. Preparing the materials takes far longer than the weaving.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Kelly Church” is native American basketry artist and educator (b. 1967). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Kelly, Church and Native, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6385983. VIAF identifies the subject as 6593159820919914000009. The Library of Congress control number is no2022142098. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1967.
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Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “Kelly Church” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.