Iviva Olenick

Brooklyn Textile Farm
Artistic Discipline: Visual Arts
Category: Brooklyn Arts Fund
Grant Year: 2021
Location: Boerum Hill
iviva-olenick.jpg

Brooklyn Textile Farm grows colonial textile cash crops from seed in collaboration with Old Stone House & Washington Park, Brooklyn, and families, children, teens, adults and seniors throughout Brooklyn and the nation. Engaging the social histories behind early textile agriculture and production, we acknowledge foundational labor by enslaved Africans and Native Americans, and their cultural and economic contributions. We also engage intercultural dye- and fiber-making processes, drawing on traditions from Asia, West Africa, Europe, the American South, South and Central America and contemporary dyers around the world. Crops include tropical indigo, Japanese indigo, woad, several species of cotton and flax. Opportunities for public harvesting, dye- and fiber-making will take social distancing needs into account. Instructional videos and Zoom information sessions might supplant in-person group activities, depending on health requirements in summer-fall 2021.