Sketch to Stitch: NY Fashion Week with Sahara Clemons

Sign up for the Black Women Stitch quarterly newsletter!   Check out our merch here Leave a BACKSTITCH message and tell us about your favorite episode. Join the Black Women Stitch PatreonAmazon Store Lisa WoolforkLisa Woolfork is an associate professor of English specializing in African American literature and culture. Her teaching and research explore Black women writers, Black identity, trauma theory, and American slavery. She is the founder of Black Women Stitch, the sewing group where Black lives matter. She is also the host/producer of Stitch Please, a weekly audio podcast that centers on Black women, girls, and femmes in sewing. In the summer of 2017, she actively resisted the white supremacist marches in her community, Charlottesville, Virginia. The city became a symbol of lethal resurging white supremacist violence. She remains active in a variety of university and community initiatives, including the Community Engaged Scholars program. She believes in the power of creative liberation.Sahara ClemonsSahara Clemons is a multimedia artist and designer born in Washington D.C and based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Clemons revels in the fluidity of artistic mediums and interweaves painting, textiles, and dance in her creative process. Her work explores the intersection of race and gender and provides commentary on the socio-political forces that shape identity. Her work has been shown at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Second Street Gallery, The Bridge Progressive Arts Institute, and McGuffey Art Center. Clemons is a YoungArts alumni and is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Rhode Island School of Design.Insights from this episode:How to go from ‘sketch’ to ‘stitch’The techniques behind textile manipulationThe importance of defining your purpose when doing creative workTips for overcoming your fear of making mistakes and taking chancesBeing creative when you don’t have a lot of resourcesQuotes from the show:“I feel like I’m a very conceptual person when it comes to making, and I think it always starts off with the story. Mainly I think the core aspect of that is making it personal and authentic to my journey as not just an artist, but as a person.” – Sahara Clemons, Stitch Please, Episode #202 [05:53]“I think too often we think about sewing or fashion and manufacturing, but that’s not all that you’re doing and this is one of the reasons I think that fashion is art. The same things that we see in art, or the things that go into making art, go into making the garments that we ultimately see.” – Lisa Woolfork, Stitch Please, Episode #202 [08:51]“What I appreciate about fashion is that idea of community-building and bringing people into the clothing.” – Sahara Clemons, Stitch Please, Episode #202 [11:35]“I wanted the collection to go through the transition of a person’s mindset when it comes to body exploration… knowing that it is a healing process rather than, ‘this is okay, my scars are okay.’ With all of society and you yourself, it’s hard to feel that way and it’s really challenging to go through that process, and that’s what I wanted to share. That it’s more about...