Who We Are

Our mission is to introduce you to unique art treasures handcrafted by the Wounaan and Embera peoples of the Darien Rainforest of Panama. We hope that this web site will help encourage awareness of the rich artistic heritage represented by this world-class collection.

Each basket represented in this website is unique, painstakingly created over weeks, months, and sometimes years! Designs are inspired by the animals and plants of the rainforest surrounding these warm-hearted people. We hope you enjoy exploring the informative articles and images about the culture that created this unique and expressive art form.

Lorran Meares

Art, for as long as Lorran Meares can remember, has been a driving force in his life. Little wonder that retirement in 2002 after a quarter-century of teaching fine-art and commercial photography in colleges and universities—and practicing commercial photography in the real world before that—would be a new beginning to exploring art with broader strokes.

A lecturer, workshop presenter and a frequent recipient of fellowships, grants and awards, Meares is an outspoken advocate for the environment and for the protection of cultural heritage and places sacred to indigenous peoples. For nearly two decades, he has collaborated with organizations such as the Department of Interior, state parks, the Bureau of Land Management, the Sierra Club and Native American tribal groups on special projects documenting and interpreting endangered sites.

In 1993, Meares produced the award-winning special edition calendar for the Sierra Club, Sacred Places, Native American Sites.

The calendar (with introduction by Pulitzer Prize winning Kiowa author N.Scott Momaday) and spinoff video brought much needed attention to the fragile nature of sacred sites.

The spiritual leader of the Wukchumne people of California claimed that this project assisted them in reclaiming an important site on their sacred lands.

More recently, his concerns for the preservation of fragile places and cultural life ways have expanded to New Zealand and Latin America, where he brought his students on photographic and cultural expeditions.

But it was an introduction to the art form of the Wounaan and Emberá peoples of the Darién Rainforest of Panamá—exceedingly fine, world-class basketry—that turned Meares and his wife, Charlotte, on their ears. Fascinated with the skill of these natural artisans, they had to learn more. And learning from and about these warm-hearted, talented people has taken Meares into their rainforest territory, documenting life in the villages, sometimes in harm’s way. Colombian guerillas and drug traffickers cross the all-too-close border and invade villages, looting, taking hostages and sometimes even senselessly killing caciques and tribal leaders.

Through the educational support and guidance of tribal leaders and weavers, Ron and Kathy Binder—missionaries and linguists living for eight years with the Wounaan—and others such as Yale Ph.D. candidate Julie Velasquez-Runk, who has also lived and studied with the Wounaan, and Llory Gibson, former Panamá gallery owner and coach to many weavers, the Meareses have found willing and selfless resources for their forthcoming book about the art of Wounaan and Emberá peoples of the Darién Rainforest. The couple believes that their collection of contemporary fine, large Wounaan and Emberá basketry may be the largest in the world.

Collecting, importing and creating awareness about Wounaan and Emberá basketry has been an all-consuming labor of love. And Meares’ loves every minute documenting the processes and the artisans whose exceptionally skilled hands nimbly work these breath-taking creations.

Meares’ fine-art photographs have been selected for numerous exhibitions across the country, including the Art Institute of Chicago; MIT Creative Photography Gallery; Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York; Memphis Academy of Art; New Orleans Museum of Art; and Schwayder Art Gallery, Denver.

These complex images have been published widely in photographic textbooks and journals as well as in well-known magazines and as solo calendars. They have been added to the collections of the Witkin Gallery, New York; Polaroid Corporation International Collection of Photography; Toyota Motors USA; and the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History, New York. Meares has been commissioned by—among others—the American Museum of Natural History, the National Park Service and Sierra Club.

For more than two decades he has been pushing the boundaries of light-painting photography to create mythical, mystical and, often, archetypal images exhibited both traditionally in two-dimensions as well as in stereoscopic three-dimensional installations. Developing fresh approaches to these techniques earned Meares international recognition and inclusion in the Macmillan Biographical Encyclopedia of Photographic Artists and Innovators.

In 2003 The Museum of New Mexico mounted his traveling solo-artist exhibition, Moments in Time. This interpretive landscape photographic exhibition continues to travel throughout the Southwest through 2005.

Nationally published articles and his appearance on the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw underscore Meares’ commitment to create images that speak for the need to protect the Sacred Places and cultural traditions of indigenous peoples.

Please visit www.enlight-10.com for an e-gallery tour of Meares' award winning images.

Charlotte Meares

Writer, researcher, artist, teacher, collector, Charlotte Meares is currently teaming with her husband, Lorran, to produce a book about the art and craft of an indigenous culture—the Wounaan and Emberá peoples of the Darién Rainforest of Panamá.

She is also president and co-owner of Rainforestbaskets.com, which works with the Wounaan and Emberá both to widen international awareness of and interest in their world-class baskets and to enhance their ability to be self-sustaining through this contemporary art form.

After rearing children, Meares served as editor at a daily paper in the Southeast, during which she published hundreds of articles, instructed writing and journalism courses and developed a communications and journalism curriculum for a liberal arts college. Concurrently with teaching, she presented seminars in public relations writing for non-profit organizations.

In 1988 she launched Enlight-10 marketing and imaging concepts. A few years later, she co-founded Four Winds Institute, a non-profit environmental education organization that conducted multi-state seminars.

Since 1987, Meares and her photographer husband, Lorran, have been actively involved in the preservation of Native American cultural and historical sites. Together, they created the award-winning special edition Sierra Club calendar, Sacred Places, Native American Sites, with foreword by N. Scott Momaday. Their subsequent landscape calendars also focused on site preservation.

Leading wilderness and cultural photographic expeditions in the U.S. and other countries, they shared with students of all ages their enthusiasm for preservation of culturally significant places and the traditions of indigenous peoples worldwide.

One of her published books, Fire of a Thousand Suns, with foreword by Enola Gay pilot Ret. Brig. Gen. Paul Tibbets, interweaves the stories of the Enola Gay tailgunner, development of the atomic bomb, the B-29 delivery system and the infamous Hiroshima mission. It raises the question of weapons of mass destruction and looks through differing eyes.

Meares attended graduate school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and completed her master’s coursework in communications, journalism and education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

In addition to editor, she held positions as an instructional designer, director of an arts council, director of marketing and public relations for a world-class opera company and marketing consultant for a large healthcare system of hospitals and physicians’ practices.

After more than a decade as a communications professional, Meares joined American Express Financial Advisors and established a planning practice in Santa Fe. Until her retirement in 2002 to launch a photography business with her husband, she taught classes and conducted workshops on personal finance and investment.

Over the years, she has cherished spare time landscape painting, backpacking, gardening and writing. She enjoys collaborating with her husband on the new book and working with Wounaan and Emberá leaders, exceptional weavers and other supportive resources.