Creating a Connected Textile Community
The mission of Local Cloth’s Blue Ridge Blanket project is to help revitalize the fiber economy in western North Carolina, by connecting fiber farmers, processors, dyers and weavers together, to produce locally sourced and crafted blankets.
Daniel Johnston is an artist, an avid supporter of WARP, a lover of textiles, and the fiancé of WARP’s Executive Director, Kelsey Wiskirchen. He was also our entertaining auctioneer at this year’s Annual Meeting in Ohio, helping us raise over $5000 for scholarships and our operation fund.
The Women’s Woven Voices project is an international, collaborative art project that supports women in claiming their empowered voices through writing, weaving, and sharing their stories. The collaborative tapestry currently has over 1,000 woven story cloths from participants from 10 different countries representing university students, Veteran women, refugee moms, art groups, schools, girl scouts, community members, church members, grandmothers, mothers, aunts, sisters, daughters, friends, neighbors, and men who are allies.
Elisa Lutteral is an Argentinean artist based in Brooklyn, working in sculptural and performative pieces revolving around the exploration of social constructions around capitalism and patriarchy and challenges these narratives of control.INGLÉS/ESPAÑOL
Nicole is an artist, maker, and mender. A long-time crafter specializing in textiles, Nicole works freelance as a textile conservator, textile repair technician, and an interdisciplinary maker with a strong commitment to textile reuse and repair.
Since ancient days, textile terms have offered a way to talk about storytelling: The storyteller weaves a story together. The reader follows the thread of a narrative. The story unspools and unfolds. In this online event, a weaver, a novelist, and a scholar talk about how textiles inspire and renew human connection.
During this program, Edwina Bringle, April Carter Price, and Danielle Lasker presented the past, present, and future of Textiles at Penland School of Craft. Edwina spoke from lived and oral histories of her 50 year relationship with Penland as student, instructor, studio coordinator, and more. April shared her experiences as a lifelong student of Penland, and Danielle shared the current happenings within the studio, and what the future looks like at Penland.
Molly Martin is a woman of many talents: seamstress, nurse, elementary school teacher in Monrovia, Liberia, and eventually African art and textile aficionado. She has worked at the Smithsonian, studied at Harvard, and taught at UMass/Lowell.