In the Studio with Joan Laib | Mingei International Museum

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By

Mariano Diaz

Published

Mar 30, 2026

Topics

Basket weaver Joan Laib talks as she works in her home studio, hands fluttering over a mold—the beginnings of a deep Nantucket-style basket taking shape. Between our conversation and the soundtrack of birds out the open window, she peppers in a “Come on baby,” here and there, talking to her damp cane as she winds them around the ribs. "The weaving is the easy part, in my opinion. And it's the most meditative. You can just zone out.” Joanie picks up the handsaw she uses to make grooves for the traditional wooden bottom, pointing out a piece of soft flannel wrapped around it, secured with an oversized safety pin. “My mom put this on there. Isn’t it cute? I change the blade, of course, but I leave this on.”

Throughout our conversations, her sweet, creative light shines through—her nickname, “Joanie", suits her sunny, Southern California energy. The baskets may look perfect, almost hard to believe they were made by a human hand, but Joan embraces the spirit of a maker and the cliché reputation that comes with it. “Sometimes, I’m a little out there, my mom was too, some attribute to age—but that’s not entirely it—it’s always been part of being a creative person too, I think. Your brain works in a different way. I used to laugh; I always thought it was fun to be called an artist because they're kind of nutty. You can get away with more. People just roll their eyes,” she says with a little chuckle.

Joanie is carrying on the basketry practice of Barbara Elizabeth Beale-Gross, her mother. We are making our way around a home studio filled with an eclectic mix of passed-down molds and old tools, found objects, and her mother’s art. “Oh I collect things here and there just because... well, just because I like it. Which is a good enough reason for anything, no?” she declares with a smile. Her studio is a cozy love letter to their mother-daughter relationship. It is clear that Joan admires Barbara as both a prolific artist and a mother; the lines of separation are blurred. 

Barbara grew up in Marion, Massachusetts; her grandfather was a captain, and can be traced by his ship's logs in the New Bedford Whaling Museum. She taught herself the traditional style of the Nantucket basket. “Having grown up in New England, it was just a part of my mother,” Joan says while weaving on one of the exact same molds her mother used. The rest of the molds look like art in themselves—smooth, curved wood in all sizes lined up on a shelf above her head, some made by her uncle and many made by her husband, Joe, her high school sweetheart, a tool and die maker, and her biggest supporter.

Joanie and her family arrived in Southern California in 1949 when she was 4 years old. Her father, a Texan, wanted to move back to his home state, but Barbara wasn’t having it. After visiting a brother in the Army and Navy Academy in Carlsbad, that was it. “My mom loved it here because the ocean was so close. She used to say, 'There's salt water in our veins!’ My father wanted to move back to Texas, but she said ‘nope, no way’.” Now, Joanie and Joe have been living in Vista, California, since the 1960s, their canyon home an oasis they have been curating for decades. She shows us antique pieces passed down and shipped from her ancestors in the northeast, adding New England flavor to mix with Joe’s handmade doors and their West Coast style. It's a fitting mash-up of the family history. Wrapped in mature gardens, the home sits next to an open canyon—a little slice of peace, nestled in a quickly developing community.

Back in our studio conversation, it’s hard for your eyes not to wander through all the collected objects layered together, more vignettes of the family’s creative history. Ceramics made by both mother and daughter, photos, feathers. And shelves of tools and molds.

“Those are what I inherited from my mom. She used to worry out loud, ‘who is going to take over my basket making’? Since I'm the only girl in the family, it was directed to me, but I didn't really want to at first. Boy, I am so grateful I did.”

At the doorway of the studio, on a little antique desk, sits a worn green ledger book. Her mother started it—every basket Barbara made in her looping cursive handwriting, where it went, and often to whom. She mostly created for herself, or as gifts. Around 2004, there is an entry “Joanie’s first basket, a gift for Joe (her husband of over 40 years).”

I ask Joan at what point did she begin to tend to her mother’s basketry practice. She pauses to think back, “I used to stop by the little shop in her garage on my way home from work, and I'd spend time with her in her little shop and her garage, and that's when I learned how to make them. She was so driven to create. I've never met anybody who produced as much as she!” Joan and her mother also shared a home ceramic studio together, which eventually transitioned into what it is today outside her home. It wasn’t until Barbara passed, that Joan dug in. “I kept her log and I just carried on. She made 300 or so, and now I’ve added 600 or something,” Joan says as she runs her finger down the list, at one point the handwriting changing from her mother’s into her own, bringing us to the ones she is working on today for Shop Mingei.

“My mother was a huge influence on me, I knew I wanted to follow in her footsteps. I went through some old writing from when I was a young woman. The prompt was, ‘Write a note to yourself about what you want to do or be when you get old.’ I wrote, ‘I want to be an old lady artist!’ And look! I think I succeeded."

"I rejected that term ‘artist’ for the longest time. I didn't want anybody to even call me an artist. I didn't feel like I really was one. But yeah, I think I can own it now. I mean, I think that's what Mingei museum is all about. It’s about being for all the people that think, ‘I don't know if I'm one?’ But you and I know, they ARE!”

Selection of baskets available in Shop Mingei.

“When my mother and I were doing ceramics together, we would go down to the main gate of Mingei and look in the shop and go, ‘Oh look! Oh that's cool stuff.’ And now! I’m in there with these baskets. Just wow, to honor everyday things. I’ve been selling at Mingei for about 15 years. What a gift to me. To all! I wanted to cry the first time the shop bought one of my baskets. I was so humbled. My mom made over 300 baskets, but only sold 1, and oh, I remember how cute she was when she sold it! She didn't care about that stuff. She gave all her baskets away. And here I am. She would be so thrilled.”

On handing down the art of basketmaking, Joan talks about interest from her daughter, Christa, a writer living in Berkeley—a basket Christa and Barbara made together sits in a spot of honor in the studio, and the first basket Joan made with her granddaughter is not far away. It’s impossible to keep from getting a bit emotional taking in the baskets made by the hands of four generations of women. But, it’s actually Joanie’s niece, a doctor on the East Coast, a mother with three kids, who is the most interested in carrying on the practice—despite (or maybe because of) her busy career and big family.

“I feel so strongly that it's nice to see people still learning these things, even in the face of everything going on in their lives and the world. Having a creative outlet, be it writing, gardening, whatever you do is just healthy—and the more hands-on, the better. It’s good for our brains. That sustains us,” Joan says, and I nod in whole-hearted agreement. “I come down here, and it’s my peace. It keeps me healthy. I got really high yesterday. Well, happy, I mean! Just thinking to myself, ‘oh I learned something!’ I was practicing a brush stroke from a painting class I am taking. It's so much fun for me to see progress that I've made. I have a little altar down there for my mom. I come here and I have quiet moments in the morning with her. She was distressed that no one was going to carry on her baskets. Of course, I said I would. Now here I am.” 

I ask Joanie a question, but I already know the answer. It’s in her face and in the energy of the little studio, Barbara’s spirit radiating from every direction. “How do you think your mom would feel about seeing where you are today?”  

“Oh wow, she would be so happy to see it all. But I mean, if she doesn't already have a hand in it all. You just keep talking to them. You know, you just don't stop. It's wonderful. We were really close.”

As Joanie says that, I can’t help but be confident that Barbara Elizabeth Beale-Gross is still so close by.

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A vignette of mid-twentieth century interior, lighting, and furniture design as selected by Ilse Ruocco for her 1950 showroom

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