On a balmy afternoon in a pueblo outside of Oaxaca, an intimate group of local artisans sits under the stately frambuyan tree in a leafy patio, peeling fiber from banana plant trunks. They’ve come to learn the Okinawan practice of banana fiber extraction from Japanese native Yuka Makino-Bullard. A Mississippi-based cotton grower, spinner, weaver, and textile artist, Yuka is completing a month-long residency at Texere, a shared textile studio, residency space, and specialty shop.
With its arabesque archways and cantera verde-limewash walls, Texere could be just another beautiful home on the outskirts of Oaxaca. But for co-founders Ana Cris Medina Palmeros and Caitlin Garcia-Ahern, bridging the cultural gap between the communities of Oaxaca and its visitors is at the core of their project. As a region rich in natural resources and traditional craft, Oaxaca has long grappled with extractive forces—from the mining of natural resources to tourism, and beyond. Texere aims to create a more equitable exchange via reciprocal knowledge sharing and sliding-scale fees, which reflect privilege and access to resources.
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“This structure allows us to build in financial accessibility from the foundation, subsidizing some residents’ lower program fees with others’ higher fees, rather than determining who is eligible for a grant or not on an individual basis,” says Caitlin.
That model has helped bring in artists such as Shamji Vishram Vankar, a turban weaver from Kutch, Gujarat, India who will join Texere in July. Through his residency, Shamji, like all the residents, will have access to the space’s looms, shared studio and equipment, and—vitally—the community of artisans and teachers Ana Cris and Caitlin have nurtured over their years in Oaxaca.
An invaluable source of knowledge and inspiration for residents, the community of Texere is among the project’s biggest draws. And those at the heart of it are textile artists and team members Laura Chimil Borro and Chuy Ruiz Sánchez, who run the space day to day, supporting residents while facilitating and participating in workshops.
Laura hails from Yalálag, a pueblo in the Sierra Norte mountains of Oaxaca. Her community is famed for their vibrant embroidered and tasseled huipiles, which they weave on a backstrap loom. In times past, the Yalálag community also spun their own yarn but no longer. “Almost everyone can weave, but we’ve lost the knowledge of how to spin,” Laura tells me. When Yuka arrived for a residency, Laura had the opportunity to learn the heritage technique of her community. “This is a craft of my ancestors, so to have met someone here at Texere who knew how to spin and had the patience to teach me—that was súper lindo,” she says.
Texere’s community reaches far beyond the walls of the space, too. Jessie Mordine Young, a Brooklyn-based textile artist and educator, tells me that Texere facilitated trips to rural communities that would have been challenging to connect with on her own. “Hearing the artists speak about their textile processes and the social import their craft holds was truly special,” says Jessie, who began her ongoing project “A Woven Year” during her residency at Texere.
Co-founder Ana Cris touches on the intimacy of these exchanges as part of what makes the experience so unique. “There is no difference between work and home for artisans and so when they invite you to their workshops, they’re inviting you into their homes, which is beautiful,” she says.
The textile space and residency also serves as a point of connection for partnerships between businesses and individual artisans. It was through Texere that Susi Vicente Galán, a skilled weaver from Oaxaca’s preeminent weaving community Teotitlán del Valle, began work with Hermano Maguey, a project that uses agave byproducts of mezcal production, to collaborate on curtains woven from ixtle, or agave fiber.
At Texere, the sliding scale fee model is paired with a requirement that residents share an offering of their own with the community to promote equitable exchange. In the spirit of trueque, a form of barter and community-centric exchange that the surrounding areas of Oaxaca have long engaged in, Texere requests residents host one or more events, like discussions, round tables, or workshops, as Yuka did with her banana fiber class.
Team member Chuy, an artist with deep knowledge of natural dyes, says the workshops from residents have been a wellspring of inspiration and technical know-how, in particular one NYC-based resident who used several natural dye techniques in unison. “I’d never seen that done before in a single item of clothing or fabric, and I was fascinated by how she combined the processes,” they say.
For the team at Texere, the offering from residents is the crux of the cultural exchange Texere aims to foster. Traditional textile artists tend to be exclusively focused on the craft of their community, and often they are unfamiliar with the technique from a community or two over, Caitlin tells me — let alone the practices of a contemporary textile artist living in Brooklyn, or a weaver from India. Texere offers a place for creative dialogue between the communities in and around Oaxaca and their visitors.
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“It’s special to learn from those who come from other countries because they, too, bring knowledge and wisdom,” says Texere team member Laura. “Even if it s the same technique, every culture has its own approach to the craft, and to say ‘I would do it this way and you do it that way, maybe we can learn something’ is the essence of the cultural exchange we want to support here at Texere,” she adds.