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Endangered Threads: Socially Committed Community

Art Action

Janis Timm-Bottos a

a Department of Creative Arts Therapies, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Available online: 27 Jun 2011

To cite this article: Janis Timm-Bottos (2011): Endangered Threads: Socially Committed Community Art Action, Art Therapy,

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Endangered Threads: Socially Committed CommunityArt Action

Janis Timm-Bottos, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Abstract

This article describes a 9-month community action projectthat took the form of an art studio located in a thrift store. Thepurpose of the project was to creatively reduce clothing fabricwaste from unused donations, and also to document the socialjustice and ecological issues involved in clothing production anddistribution. Collaboration with an art therapist coordinator,volunteers, and thrift shop workers gradually grew to attractlocal crafters, youth “refashion designers,” and free clothingdistributors and recipients. A youth-initiated event incubatedwithin the studio, as well as other results of the project,indicated successful and sustainable community building andexpression. Community art therapy methods helped realize thegoal of relational transformation and meaningful action.

“By seeing differently, we do differently.”(James Hillman, 1975, p. 122)

In April 2010 I was speeding through East St. Louis inthe back seat of a taxi heading to Southern Illinois Universityat Edwardsville to present a workshop to art therapists whenI spotted a billboard that read, “Dress Like There Is No Re-cession.” Besides a fleeting moment of feeling self-consciousabout the thrift store togs I was wearing, I viewed the bill-board as an affirmation of the urgency of the message I wasabout to deliver.

The liberation arts workshop I had planned for that dayhad its start at a public meeting I attended 12 months priorwith a small group of women who ran a local nonprofit thriftstore in Nelson, British Columbia, Canada. The women hadbecome increasingly concerned about the amount of do-nated clothing that they were having to throw away and had

Editor’s Note: Janis Timm-Bottos, PhD, ATR-BC, LPAT, isan Assistant Professor of Art Therapy in the Department of Cre-ative Arts Therapies at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec,Canada. The author would like to thank the staff and volunteersof the West Kootenai Women in Need Society thrift store; Chil-dren of the Seams; Self Design High School; the Columbia BasinTrust; the Nelson & District Credit Union; Karen Livingston,Grace Devaux, Pascale Roger, Leo Bottos, and Bobbie Ogletree.Special thanks to Laura Carter, Policy Assistant to the General Sec-retary of the International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers’Federation, for her informational meetings. Correspondence con-cerning this article can be addressed to the author at janis.timm-bottos@concordia.ca

called the meeting to ask the community for help in solvingthis waste problem. They reported that up to six dumpsterloads per week were going into the garbage from all of thethrift stores in that small town of 10,000 people. This rep-resented approximately 300 dumpster loads of fabric goinginto the West Kootenay landfill each year. Much of the ma-terial was primarily good quality cotton and potentially veryuseful. It was not surprising that the disposal expense wascausing concern for a nonprofit business; what was unusualwas that the women felt such a strong moral obligation toreduce the waste. The thrift store was unique in other ways:It had a social mission of mentoring women who were reen-tering the work place, first by training them as store volun-teers with a weekly honorarium and then hiring them as paidworkers.

Like many other artists and art therapists, I see most re-cycled materials as potential art materials. A large volume ofdiscarded materials also strikes me as a potential source ofincome to support a community studio. Practically speak-ing, however, I have found that it is nearly impossible to livein the world without generating massive amounts of unre-cyclable trash. My recent family move across Canada was anunwelcomed reminder of this reality. But even more disturb-ing, there is “a secret about waste no one really wants to talkabout and it’s this: The freedom to generate waste and notworry about what happens to it is what powers the economy”(Rufus & Lawson, 2009, p. 83).

Donating unwanted clothing to thrift stores seems likean antidote to this troubling mind-set. However, as I learnedfrom the women in Nelson, thrift stores commonly throwaway over half of what is donated, primarily heaps ofwomen’s clothing. Clothing for resale must be in excellentcondition and often people donate trash instead: stained,ripped, or simply worn-out clothing, heaps of unmatchedsocks, and piles of single shoes and gloves. Sometimes this isdone because it is too expensive to discard trash and some-times people are simply being lazy. Something I have no-ticed about myself when bagging up my own donations isthat when I have been attached to a piece of clothing or a fa-vorite pair of worn out shoes, I have resisted throwing themaway. I can see how easy it is to unthinkingly pass this dutyon to someone else.

After the community meeting, I made a point of stop-ping in the thrift store and picking up one of the many bagsof fabric that I now knew were heading to the dumpster thatweek. I wanted to see if I could make something with thecontents of a random bag of unsalable fabric. A week laterI took my rag rug basket back to the thrift store to share

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with the employees. The manager of the store told me shewas posting a job for a “fabric reclamation coordinator” andasked whether I was interested in applying. For me, it was aperfect call to action. I became interested in analyzing thislocal environmental issue further, with the hope of creativelyredirecting the tons of clothes going into the regional land-fill. I did what a community art therapist could do: I set upa small studio space in the corner of the Nelson thrift storefor incubating ideas, increasing awareness, generating con-versation, and, most importantly, for taking action.

Setting up working community studios has been a sus-tained practice of mine over the past 17 years. My firstcollaborative studio, ArtStreet (Timm-Bottos 1995, 2001),focused on providing a public art space for many peoplewho were self-described artists with no private space (orhomes) in which to make art. Another endeavor, OFFCen-ter Community Arts (Timm-Bottos, 2006), took this pub-lic homeplace idea further with entrepreneurial methods forartists who were supporting themselves on small incomesand needed to become more solidly connected with theircommunity. The heart of the mission for both projects wascommunity building through art making. I initially envi-sioned the Nelson thrift store project, known as Kitchen Ta-ble Arts, to be a scaled-down version of these former stu-dios that would provide a diverse selection of free recyclablematerials for art making. The overwhelming abundance ofclothing, however, quickly filled the space and guided theproject towards fabric arts expression.

Funded in part by the Columbia Basin Trust and theNelson & District Credit Union, Kitchen Table Arts was a9-month project. Participants were neighbors, friends, andmany others in a growing community network of peoplewho became interested in the project and wanted to help outwith organizing the materials. We set out to understand a lo-cal environmental issue and to creatively respond to waste.Essentially, we faced a problem of abundance; to understandit we became a small but mighty group of self-describedartists who decided to redirect all of the non-trash materialsheading to the landfill for a 3-month period. We then con-tinued to collect specific materials that we knew could bereused, literally filling a 1,500-square-foot warehouse spaceadjacent to the thrift store (Figure 1). We discovered certaintypes of materials were donated in the greatest abundance:cotton T-shirts, men’s polo shirts with front buttons, denimjeans, and fleece outerwear. By the end of the project, theT-shirts, denim, ski jackets, and most of the fleece had beensuccessfully taken out of the waste stream.

What initially surprised us was how much of the wasteappeared to be completely wearable. This realization cre-ated an internal issue that was never fully resolved, dueto the store’s sorting criteria that deemed many clothesundesirable—if only for being out of style, out of season,or simply not what the customers wanted. The Nelsonthrift shop also had a policy of boycotting and automati-cally throwing away clothing that carried logos or brandingfrom things like Disney or tobacco- or alcohol-related com-panies or products. Throughout the project we would recir-culate such items as leather jackets, winter coats, pants, andbaby clothing, sending them back into the sorting stream.

In this respect, we considered ourselves “miners” rather thansorters, looking for “gems” to redistribute back to the storeor to give to individuals, families, and groups who neededthe clothing.

Another task was the culling and collecting of fabrics torepackage and sell or save for crafters. This material includedslightly stained solid color T-shirts that could be combinedand remade; denim for utilitarian sand bags and patchworkblankets; fleece for housing insulation; colorful polyester forrug making; specialty fabrics such as silk, linen, and flan-nel for special uses; wool sweaters for felting; and leather forcrafting. Eventually, we also started to cut and save all of theT-shirt logos and images for fabric collage, and snipped allbuttons from the clothing being disassembled for rags. Hav-ing dissected the clothing down to its unadorned seams andlabels, we became aware that the clothing label surprisinglyprovided the most significant clues to the social, environ-mental, and political impact of fabric waste.

The Life Cycle of a T-Shirt

Learning how to read the Federal Trade Commission’sclothing label codes gave us a way to investigate where theclothing originated and led us on an interesting though un-expected journey. The clothing label code (RN or CA num-ber) indicates the manufacturer’s name and location andsometimes a website. The website may provide clues aboutwhere the raw materials were grown and harvested. Whileexamining the life cycle of the clothing that ended up in theNelson thrift store, we began to grasp the global nature ofthe issue we were dealing with and its wide-reaching socialjustice implications.

The power imbalances between the rich and the poorin cotton manufacturing continue today as they did a cen-tury ago in the southern United States. According to Rivoli(2009), the early U.S. dominance of the cotton industry il-lustrates how “commercial success can be achieved throughmoral failure, an observation relevant for T-shirts, whichcritics allege are produced under sweatshop conditions notfar removed from slavery” (p. 14). In today’s global mar-ketplace, it is not uncommon for the production of theubiquitous T-shirt to stretch across three continents and in-volve hundreds of different people. It is estimated that some100 million rural households around the world are involvedin cotton production and supply worth $32 billion a year(Fairtrade Foundation, 2005). Although production is car-ried out worldwide, about 70% of the U.S. market is con-trolled by 14 brand-name retailers, including Nike, Reebok,Adidas, the Gap, J.C. Penney, andWal-Mart (Rivoli, 2009).These multinational companies design the shirts and thencontract out their production to the lowest priced manufac-turers around the world.

Numerous labor and safety violations within each stageof producing something as seemingly simple as a T-shirt or apair of jeans have been documented, including forced childlabor, inadequate pay, inhumane working conditions (Inter-national Textile, Garment and Leather Workers Federation,2009), and exposure to dangerous pesticides. It is estimatedthat it takes 0.75 lb of chemicals to produce one pair of

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Figure 1 Kitchen Table Arts: Warehouse Collection Site (Color !gure available online)

jeans (Snyder, 2007) and twice that amount to produce oneT-shirt (Fairtrade Foundation, 2005). In addition, there isenormous water usage associated with the production of cot-ton. An estimated 2,900 liters of water is required to produceone cotton shirt. The World Wide Fund for Nature (2008)estimated that 3.7% of the global water usage is necessary tosatisfy the West’s thirst for T-shirts. The most shocking vi-sual effect of this usage are satellite photographs of the AralSea from which water was diverted over a 15-year period toirrigate the Uzbek and Turkmenistan cotton fields. Thesephotographs show fishing boats run aground in a dried-upsea of sand (“Aral Sea,” 2010).

The other end of the T-shirt’s life story also has devastat-ing effects. Discarded clothing, comprised of an overwhelm-ing number of T-shirts, has become the leading import formany impoverished countries. Rivoli (2009) found that be-tween 1995 and 2007, the United States exported “nearly 9billion pounds of used clothing and other worn textile prod-ucts to the rest of the world and the industry now has cus-tomers in more than 100 countries” (p. 216). For example,T-shirts that read “Burning Man Music Festival Volunteer‘08,” “I Love New York,” or “I’m With Stupid” replace thebrilliantly colored patterns of traditional African clothing.

According to the International Textile, Garment andLeather Workers Federation (2009), a global union of affili-

ated organizations with a combined membership of 10 mil-lion workers, many African countries that once had thrivingclothing industries have been negatively affected by this re-sale industry. For example, Zimbabwe has lost 12,000 of its24,000 textile jobs and 30,000 of Zambia’s 34,000 jobs havedisappeared since the economy was opened to foreign trade12 years ago. Jeter (2009) reported that Zambia’s textile fac-tories were “overmatched by wholesalers delivering afford-able, passable clothing, often made with subsidized materi-als in rich nations, without paying production costs, tariffsor customs” (p. 1). These job losses have devastated Africaneconomies in regions where a single worker often supportsup to 20members of his or her extended family (Jeter, 2009).

Rivoli (2009), an economist who writes about the usedclothing business in relationship to world trade markets andits associated power and politics, suggested there are otherperspectives involved in this issue. For example, she de-scribed Gulam Dewji, a successful Tanzania entrepreneur,who sees the “mitumba” trade in clothing thrown away byAmericans and Europeans as stimulating an entrepreneurialmarket revival that may eventually create more jobs than ithas destroyed. Dewji and many other small business own-ers have become players in the lopsided corporate clothingtrade, which has historically benefited only powerful U.S.corporations. These new entrepreneurs believe that the bales

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of recycled T-shirts and other garments in Zambia have a de-mocratizing influence and provide many new opportunitiesfor small businesses to participate in a global market place(Rivoli, 2009, p. 238). Promoters of this local phenomenonalso point out that in 2007, 15% of textiles were recoveredfrom the 12 million tons of municipal textile waste (Rivoli,2009, p. 246).

This controversial global approach of exporting fabricwaste does not answer the moral question of how to discardclothing in the West. But for a small group of artists associ-ated with the Nelson thrift shop, it was an issue we neededto consider as we set out to actively reclaim the “endangeredthreads” heading to the local landfill.

Results of the Kitchen Table Arts Project

At Kitchen Table Arts, one of the first ideas we tried wasnot successful. The thrift store workers recognized that therewas a need for free clothing in the community. To addressthis need the employers and manager of the store were hop-ing to set up free redistribution sites throughout the region.I suggested that by creatively labeling the free clothing “En-dangered Threads” and placing it on decorated hangers inopen, handcrafted wooden closets, we could attract recip-ients and curtail most of the waste. To our bewilderment,one nonprofit organization after another said that they didnot want to distribute the free clothes. Some said they wereworried that the clothes would become an unsightly messto clean up. Some felt there wasn’t a need in their area orthat they had enough used clothes of their own to distribute.The free clothing distribution idea, however, did lead to con-ducting awareness workshops in surrounding communitieswhere participants made art with the fabrics while we sharedand discussed what we were learning about environmentaland global impacts.

A second idea generated excitement as we packagedand sold six to eight similarly colored T-shirts along withrefashioning ideas in each package. The nicely labeledpackages looked beautiful in their sleek, clear plastic bags,piled in rainbow colors on the shelves. Thanks to DIY(do-it-yourself ) videos through YouTube.com as well asMegan Nicolay’s creative ideas in her two books, GenerationT: 108 Ways to Transform a T-Shirt (2006) and GenerationT: Beyond Fashion: 120 New Ways to Transform a T-shirt(2009), re-crafting T-shirts became a welcomed localnovelty. We also began to resell all unwearable wool, leather,linen, and silk clothing for re-crafting.

Over the 9-month period of the project, over $10,000in revenue was generated in grants and craft material sales.The resale of used and repackaged craft materials earnedthe Kitchen Table Arts project an average of $140 per week.Our costs in the same period amounted to approximately$8,000, with most of the expense going to overhead, asmall salary, and artist honoraria. Cost reduction for thethrift store included the savings of one dumpster per week,or $2,400 total savings (based on $75 a week savingsin dumping fees). The added excitement of the project,which brought in more shoppers and better donations,

also was a clear bonus to the store. Networking as a freematerial outlet for local crafters was a lot of fun. The projectattracted the region’s rug makers, weavers, and other newlyidentified entrepreneurs such as resourceful new mothersand our own youth “refashion designers.” Everyone winsin such a situation. Word quickly got out that we had freematerials and soon we were a popular support for othernonprofit organizations’ crafty fundraising efforts, such asthe Endangered Species potholder project, the Eco Center’swork initiative, and the Women Centre’s bag projects.

One of the principles of “scavenomics” is to unleashthe creative power of scavengers. “Often, they and only theycan come up with a use for discards, turning negative valueinto positive value” (Rufus & Lawson, 2009, p. 85). Amaz-ing scavengers at the Nelson thrift shop volunteered to lookthrough each of the bags heading to the dump and werecommitted to coming up with ideas of what to do with allthe stuff. One such volunteer was my neighbor Karen. Be-sides regularly distributing children’s clothing to receptivelocal elementary schools in the area, Karen starting cuttingup stained T-shirts to make colorful balls of T-shirt yarn forcrocheting. She also made 30 rolls of cotton bandages thatwere sent to Mauritania through a Lutheran medical relieforganization. Her own rag rugs were beautiful and had theproject continued, Karen would have effortlessly shared herremarkable talent for rug making. At the end of the projectKaren stated, “When I went to help clean it out at the end,there really wasn’t all that much ‘junk.’ Most had been usedby someone” (K. Livingston, personal communication, June23, 2010).

Grace, another indispensible volunteer, mentored oth-ers on the sewing machines with T-shirt remake ideas. Shedesigned and experimented with a variety of styles and col-ors, including T-shirt scarves, polo shirt pillow covers, T-shirt backpacks, children’s superhero capes, and baby bibsand booties. These were then displayed with hand-illustratedinstructions in the window of the small studio space. In ad-dition, Grace worked closely with a group of local nursingstudents heading to Guatemala to develop a reusable men-strual pad especially suitable for the particular conditionsthat the women faced there. She stated, “There was an abun-dance of flannel and toweling material available and I man-aged to get several women interested in sewing these padsand finding people who would deliver them on their trav-els” (G. Devaux, personal communication, June 24, 2010).Grace also designed and made a dozen aprons using recycleddenim jeans and gingham shirts for the ruffles, which wereworn by the thrift store workers.

Non-juried art exhibits at the thrift store featured artistswho regularly used recycled materials and fabrics in their artmaking. Jem, a long time local artist, told me later that aftershe sold her art off the thrift store gallery wall, two restaurantowners in town invited her to show her work in their galleryspaces. A friend of Jem’s was a serious “freeganomics” advo-cate (someone who doesn’t buy anything and subsists insteadon food and clothing found in dumpsters and alleys). Wewere fortunate to have her display her beautiful intricatelydesigned quilts, made entirely from discarded clothing(Figure 2).

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Figure 2 Kitchen Table Arts: Community Studio in the Corner of the Thrift Store With Display of Quilts Made FromDiscarded Clothing (Color !gure available online)

Although much of the work was conducted withthe intention of reusing materials heading to the landfill,other benefits abounded, including new friendships andexpanding opportunities. One woman said she was inspiredto take more risks creatively and that the freely availablematerials allowed her to make mistakes in order to discovernew ways of doing things. Pascale, the thrift store’s volunteercoordinator, stated that through participation in the projectshe was able to see solutions that had escaped her thoughtsup until that point. “It became easy to see that a change wasneeded and that I was ready for the next step” (P. Roger,personal communication, July 10, 2010). The peoplewho came together to take action in this project were aninspiration to all who came to see their fabric inventions,and they may have unwittingly inspired our most treasuredunexpected result: Children of the Seams and their originalup-cycled fashion show.

Children of the Seams: Up-CycledFashion and Art Collective

“When materials are free, imagination becomes cur-rency for spirit” (Rufus & Lawson, 2009, p. 122). Indeed,

one welcomed result that arose within the studio environ-ment came from an idea of a teen who had been strugglingto be recognized for her strengths. When Christine saw theabundance of clothing available as a result of our project, sheenvisioned a recycled fashion show. Other than periodicallymining for particular clothing, however, we did not see heragain until the day of the show when she reappeared in thegrand finale with her gorgeous line of animal-inspired gar-ments. Another young woman who was volunteering at thethrift store put the idea of a fashion show into motion andenlisted others through weekly meetings at the Kitchen Ta-ble Arts studio. Other youth came through word of mouthand a name was chosen for their group: Children of theSeams. Two young men were enlisted to develop a posterand a website (http://childrenoftheseams.com) to place acall for other young designers. One created an outstandingcollection of clothes inspired by Victorian black lace, andthe other filmed, edited, and posted the entire fashion showonline.

More youth showed up—some sewed in the studio andothers took garments to sew at home or at school (Figure 3).Every week the designers gathered as many materials as theywanted or needed for their particular vision. One designerexplained, “I used many large T-shirts that I repurposed andmade a dress from a bunch of men’s button-down shirts. My

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Figure 3 Youth Working With Discarded T-Shirts at SelfDesign High School (Color !gure available online)

color scheme was reds and rich jewel tones and then lots andlots of stripes and lace.” Each of the 10 designers contributedfour or five pieces (Figure 4) that came together in a fabu-lous sold-out fashion show (Figure 5) held at an alternative

Figure 4 Children of the Seams: Example From FashionShow (Color !gure available online)

Figure 5 Children of the Seams: Up-Cycled FashionShow (Color !gure available online)

high school that also provided the finale to the school’s lo-cal TEDX (Technology, Entertainment and Design) event(http://www.ted.com/tedx). These young people raised al-most $800 from the show and planned to use the money topurchase sewing machines to set up at the alternative highschool in anticipation of their next fashion show. Olivia, oneof the youth who took on a strong public relations role forthe group, eloquently described the process:

Of course, the collaboration of somany different young artistsran into some bumpy times just because there were so manyvarying ideas happening. But in the end, the variation of stylesis what made the show so interesting and what reinforced theidea that anything goes and that creativity doesn’t fit into abox. The differing body types in the models, inspirations ofthe designers, and different collections, in my opinion, wasthe strongest point of the show. And this unusual assortmentcould not have happened had we not been using recycled ma-terial, because the recycled material made for really uniqueand one-of-a-kind pieces. I think people who attended thefashion show were also impressed that the show was entirelyyouth organized—and it was. Each participant had some-thing different to contribute, be it technical talents (sound,pictures, and website), public speaking, publicity, designs, orevent organizing. Everyone’s quirky and varied talents cametogether to create a very unexpected and surprise success forthe event. It was amazing how many community memberswere there! I was so proud. (O. Mansveld, personal commu-nication, July 7, 2010)

As we were winding down the Kitchen Table Artsproject, we opened the thrift store’s warehouse for twoconsecutive weekends so that the public could freely accessthe remaining clothing and other materials. Through wordof mouth and with very little advertisement, over 200people arrived to take away large bag loads of clothing.Caring individuals returned a second time with otherfamilies to share the bounty of the occasion. In the endthere was very little waste left.

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Conclusion

“May we look upon our treasures, and the furniture ofour houses, and (our) garment . . . and try whether the seedsof war have any nourishment in (these) possessions” (Wool-man, as cited in Moulton, 1989, p. 255).

We are all connected on one small, blue-green planet.What happens to discarded clothes in North America affectspeople on the other side of the planet as well. Ultimately ourwell-being will depend on the health and wellness of eachother and the earth. But too often, I believe, art therapy andother depth psychologies unnecessarily cut the inner warp ofpsychic work from the outer weave of political life. Libera-tion psychologists Lorenz andWatkins (2003) explained thehistorical inclination “to split ideas from action, psyche fromculture and psychological work from cultural work” (p. 20).The Kitchen Table Arts project attempted the difficult pro-cess of holding psyche and culture together, “to witness painas it issues from both quarters, and to enter the mess andfray of participation, solidarity, and responsibility” (p. 20).

Lorenz and Watkins’s (2003) perspective also remindsus that this false separation resonates with Jung’s definitionof individuation, a process that has been damaged by the riseof industrialization and competitive individualism. Jung sawthat individuation is only possible with people and throughpeople. “You must realize that you are a link in a chain,”he wrote, “not an electron suspended somewhere in spaceor aimlessly drifting through the cosmos. You are part ofan atomic structure, and that atomic structure is part of amolecule which, with others, builds up a body” (as cited inLorenz & Watkins, 2003, p. 18).

The Kitchen Table Arts project ended abruptly, partlydue to the completion of the grant but also despite severalgrant possibilities and energetic new players who were in-terested in taking on vital next steps. The thrift store sud-denly announced it was closing. Financial stresses from theeconomic recession were catching up with the nonprofitsociety that sponsored the store. In addition, a few keystaff members developed other aspirations and were mov-ing on. The closing of the thrift store felt like a great lossto the community, especially to those who relied on thestore for multiple reasons. Before the store actually closedits doors, however, another thrift store business jumped inand took over the space, and life, with all of its changes, wenton.

Community art therapy acknowledges that the fabricof culture provides the necessary healing context for indi-vidual healing, therapeutic art making, and transformativecommunity dialogue. The Kitchen Table Arts project pro-vided such a space, inviting the imagination to explore whatturned out to be a complex global social justice issue. Thehandmade self-expression of many individuals set in mo-tion a creative collective response that culminated in smalltransformations in each other and in the local environment.This type of activity may serve as an antidote to thought-less purchase of yet another unneeded T-shirt or from re-lentless mainstream messages like the billboard that read,“Dress Like There Is No Recession.” Redressing, reclaiming,remaking, and creatively restoring our abundance, even as itshows up as environmental fabric waste, is one such dialog-

ical conversation that welcomes cooperative creative actionin receptive spaces.

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