The International Folk Art Market starts on Thursday through the weekend in Santa Fe. The annual market has long served as a space for international artists to sell their work and for community members to experience cultures from outside the country.
This year’s International Folk Art Market will be at the Santa Fe Railyards where artists from all over the world sell their work and support their communities back in their home countries.
Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez is an Indigenous Quechua weaver, spinner, natural dyer, and knitter from Chinchero in the Cusco region of Peru. She said she learned weaving from her mother when she was very young. She said textile is a patrimony and their identity.
“We have inherited from thousands of years ago, long before even the Inca culture, and we have many techniques. It had been used from the everyday daily life activities to the rituals and special pieces, even afterlife,” she said.
Alvarez is the director of the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco, a nonprofit celebrating its 30th year, that is committed to preserving ancient Incan and Andean weaving tradition by employing over 300 Quechua women weavers.
“Especially women, well-educated with different careers, and they're coming back into the birthplace and rejoining the adult group, in some groups that are third, fourth generations now, and the elders who left us this knowledge, they're gone from this world, you know,” she said.
Alvarez said in today’s climate, there are massive production factories for textiles but she said the work they do is personal.
“The type of the textiles that we make with our weavers, it's hand-made totally from the alpaca wool fibers, natural dyed colors woven in the back strap like in original way that we had been doing, and each piece unique,” she said.
Alvarez has returned to the International Folk Art Market for years and said the lasting connections she has with her customers is what keeps her coming back.
“Many of them, they will ask about, you know, who we are, who are the weavers, and each piece of our textile that has a picture and the name of the weaver materials, what they used for. We learn, we take photos, each other, we build up our relationship,” she said.
Alvarez is just one of about 150 artists from dozens of countries who will be at the market with other artists specializing in mask carving, basket weaving, jewelry, textiles, pottery and more.
Support for this coverage comes from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
