Elana Joy Wetzne
Yutaka Sho, an assistant professor of architecture at Syracuse, has helped rebuild housing in Rwanda since she visited the genocide-ravaged
country in 2008. She was a founder of GA Collaborative, a nonprofit
group of design practitioners and educators, which assists in these
efforts. But recently, she hit a fund-raising wall to continue the
Rwanda work, so she appealed to Jungil Hong, a visual artist, whom she
met when they were students at the Rhode Island School of Design. "Fund
raising is just not fun," said Ms. Sho. "We're not very good at it. We
hate to beg. But we can make art, so we wanted to combine those two
things together."
They invited 14 artists, most of them friends from their School of
Design days, to make African-inspired designs for fabric in a project
they are calling StitchWorks. The Headlight Hotel Print Shop and Tiny
Showcase gallery in Providence, R.I., has printed the fabric patterns on
paper, and the prints will be sold to raise funds for the housing
project. The first set of prints, pictured here, are by Melissa Brown of
New York City and Ara Peterson of Providence.
Every other week, a new pair of 10-by-10-inch prints will be released as part of the Fund-a-House project on tinyshowcase.com
for $40 each. Up to 80 percent of the sales will be donated to buy
building materials for the housing project in the village of Masoro in
Rwanda, Ms. Sho said.
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