STORY CLOTH WORKSHOP

Artist Sharon Gonce also hosted “Story Cloth” workshops in the summer of 2019 to help support Facing Ourselves. The finished story cloths were shown to great acclaim in the Facing Ourselves: Carpinteria exhibition at the Lynda Fairly Carpinteria Arts Center in 2019.

The Arpillera Movement originated in 1974 in Chile when groups of women used scraps of fabric, leather, felt, wood, fibers & hand stitching to create narratives of the poverty, hardship, violence & repression under General Augustus Pinochet’s dictatorship.  These arpilleras were secretly distributed abroad & sold to earn money for the women with families whose husbands & children had forcibly disappeared. None of these “desaparecidos” have ever been found.  Later, making arpilleras became popular in the shantytowns of Peru, depicting mostly the people’s everyday life & earning money for some of the poorest families.