This past Monday, my friend Reyna invited me to help out with an event she was coordinating – a rug-hooking workshop with the project that she is helping to manage, along with Ramona (the former director of Oxlajuj B’atz’) and Mary Anne Wise, a rug-hooking artist/designer from Minnesota. Check out this website for more information about the project!
The workshop brought together around thirty different women from seven different cooperatives, varying in ability from expert rug-hookers (each cooperative has one teacher of their own, an artisan who learned directly from Mary Anne in one of her earlier workshops and who is now helping to teach the other artisans in her community) to brand-new students. Mary Anne purchases all of the rugs that the women make, and then sells them in the states – for hundreds of dollars.