Join photographer, researcher and storyteller, Eric Mindling, as he provides us with a glimpse into his historical documentary project, Living Threads: Oaxaca’s Traditional Dress and the People Who Wear It that looks at the grand diversity of styles of traditional dress and the people who wear them in Oaxaca, Mexico. From sweeping portraiture, insights into a changing world and the sharing of his personal motives to undertake this two year project, Mindling opens our eyes to a wondrous land and people.

Mindling will present the work of the Living Threads Project, a product of two years of field work covering more than 50 Indigenous communities, it is the most complete photographic documentation of Oaxaca’s traditional dress and the people who wear it ever to be undertaken. The award-winning photographs will be published in the new book Oaxaca Stories in Cloth, a Book about People, Belonging, Identity, and Adornment. In the words of Ana Paula Fuentes, the founding director of the Textile Museum of Oaxaca, “…nothing like this exists in Mexico or the world. It is a jewel of a textile registry, but done artistically, with sensitivity, with ingenuity and with love.”

Throughout the globe, traditional cultures and arts are at a crossroads in time. Rapid changes over the last sixty years, the period of a single lifetime, have pushed availability of cheap, manufactured goods, as well as the influence of commercial media into most corners of the planet. There now exists an aging generation of people who were born into unique traditional ways witnessing their children abandon these in favor of commercial goods. Much of the human genius and creativity built over the millennia still exists, but as the grandmothers and begin to pass, so too does their cultural heritage.

Join us for a conversation on all of this sprinkled with a touch of cultural misappropriation with Mindling and and Brooklyn Fashion+Design Accelerator Academic Fellow Carmen Malvar.  Through this talk we’ll glimpse into the world of indigenous dress ways and profound heritage, as well as an invitation to reflect on our own roots or rootlessness.

 

Cost: $10

Website: bkaccelerator.com