Reaching Local to Global

Friday, August 14, 2009
Posted by: Folk Art Market

I had an opportunity to be a part of the Folk Art Market that was organized at Santa Fe from 11-12, July 2009. It was an amazing experience. More than 125 artists from 46 countries gathered at one place, exhibiting their unique talent steeped in the rich traditions and culture of their lands. On the one hand there were works of embroidery, textile work of Afghanistan and block printing and woven works from India, while on the other hand there were woodworks, Pakistani truck painting, and Ecuadorian beadwork, to name just a few.

The Market has been providing a wonderful platform for the folk artists around the world to show their beautiful works to the people, share their experience and skills with visitors and artists from other parts of the world and thus enrich others and be enriched in the process. The Market has become a global confluence of the folk artists and the people from various ethnicities, communities, and nationalities. 

More than 23,000 people visited the Market this year. There was huge interest in the folk art for sale among the visitors which translated into large sales for almost all the artists. Items from Kandahar, Afghanistan in traditional needle embroidery called Khamak sold like hotcakes.  On average each artist was able to sell goods worth over $15,000 within two days– a great incentive for artists particularly from the developing and under-developed world. Total sales for the weekend reached $1.95 million!

The Market also provided the artists with opportunities to participate in Market artists training programs focused on pricing, display, other market opportunities, and web marketing. All artists got the firsthand experience of the real market. More than 1,500 volunteers worked for days and nights to make the Market a truly successful event.

I participated as a representative of Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) which is a membership based organization of poor self employed women in India. Currently SEWA has more than one million members including 15,000 artisans from across India. SEWA has been promoting an integrated approach to livelihood security of Women in the informal sector for more than 3 decades. It has been actively working towards women’s empowerment.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton interacts with members of Self Employed Women’s Association, in Mumbai, India, July 18, 2009.  Photo Credit: Kakade/AP.

SEWA Trade Facilitation center (STFC) was established in 2003 by these 15,000 artisans working in textile and handicraft sector. The vision of STFC was to ensure socio-economic security and full employment by building a grassroots business enterprise of the artisans. STFC achieves this by sustained, profitable and efficient coordination of design, production and marketing of their products and services in mainstream national and international markets. Recently US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton renewed her association with the artisans of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a group she first came into contact with 14 years ago when she was America’s first lady.  She spent a little over an hour. “I am very happy to be here in your midst and meeting you all,” she said after closely examining the textiles an d handicrafts displayed by the artisans. She was updated on the progress achieved by the founded in 2007 in New York to take the work of grassroots artisans to the global level and link them to the world markets and to improve the situation of women in underdeveloped and developing countries. She and SEWA founder Ela Bhatt co-chair the council.

– Trupti Trivedi
Sr. Coordinator, USA
SEWA