Culture and Craft: Chilean Arpilleras

About this event

Culture and Craft invites participants to learn about the history and shared meaning of different communities through hands-on exploration of craft traditions. Chilean Arpilleras are a type of protest art that evolved in Chile during the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who usurped the democratically-elected socialist leader Salvador Allende in a US-backed coup in 1973. Before the coup, these tapestries on burlap mainly depicted pastoral life and scenes from folklore. During the Pinochet era, secretive arpillera groups organized by Catholic churches resisting the regime became places for women to gather and craft. Many families lost breadwinners as the dictatorship "disappeared" dissident men, and arpillera workshops offered a space to both make money through the sale of their art as well as depict the atrocities of the dictatorship in a format that could be rolled up and smuggled out for the rest of the world to see.

Description from rvalibrary.libcal.com