Julia Parker is a master basket weaver of the Coast Miwok and Kashaya Pomo tribes and a student of the great basket weavers of the twentieth century, Lucy Telles (Yosemite Miwok/Mono Lake Paiute), Mabel McKay, (Cache Creek Pomo), and Elsie Allen (Cloverdale Pomo). Over the last forty years, Parker has become one of the pre-eminent Native American basket makers in California. A respected elder of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and long-time resident of Yosemite Valley, Parker is prolific artist, teacher, and storyteller.
Since 1960, Parker has been working as Cultural Specialist at the Yosemite Museum, where she interprets the traditional ways of the Native peoples who populated the Yosemite Valley for generations to park visitors. She has taught and lectured across the United States at universities, cultural centers, and schools. She has traveled to Alaska, Hawaii, and Australia to meet with indigenous artists and has been invited by numerous museums, including the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, to consult with specialists about collections stored in their facilities.
Parker’s work is in permanent collections of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Yosemite Museum, Yosemite National Park; the Norwegian Ski Association headquarters, Oslo, Norway; the private collection of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom; and numerous other private collections.
In 2004, Parker's work was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition, The Past in Present Tense: Four Decades of Julia Parker Baskets,[1] installed at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek. In the same year she was featured in a segment of KQED’s program Spark.[2] In 2006, California College of the Arts conferred an honorary doctorate to Parker[3], and in 2007 she was the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship.[4][5]