Mendwear was an experiment with textile waste that began during Covid, and played out across 2021-23. It began with me learning to mend clothes by patching and darning, activities that helped me stay calm, cool and creatively engaged during that period of global isolation. It eventually grew into a little collection of side hustles which culminated in Mendwear’s participation in a group show of textile art that proved to be Tortuga Gallery’s final exhibition under the curation of its originators.
The process: Albuquerque thrift store “The Common Good” takes in donations from its suburban community. Volunteers pick through this material, putting their selections out on the floor for sale, and bagging up the rest—often 30-40 cubic yards of apparel waste per month. I bought 5-10 cubic yards per month from them, and picked through it with a new rubric:
— clothes in good repair that met the criteria of the a handful of community orgs that clothed asylum-seekers from Latin America; folks recently released from prison; and unhoused folks.
— clothes in good repair that would sell on eBay, particularly odd or vintage items.
— unsalable clothes in bad repair but made of natural fibers that I could repair and sell or give away; and
— unsalable clothes that other artists could tinker with
— unsalable clothes in bad repair that I could deconstruct into materials for upcycled apparel.
Over the course of the project, I experimented with that process, learning about the “value” in a garment, and the values held close by the many folks impacted by the political and ecological realities of “fast fashion.”
In bringing Mendwear to life, I made connections with local community organizers; picked, processed and sold hundreds of items of apparel on eBay; and mended beloved items for all kinds of folks from my communities, from family and friends to strangers. I cut up hundreds of garments that I couldn’t sell on, building a big bank of 100% natural fiber materials; and I made items for sale, for gifts, and for my own use: newsboy hats, vests, tote bags.
I learned that the process had promise—it did make a financial profit, though a meager one. It did produce useful apparel, and restore broken apparel to good use, thereby creating another form of financial gain, albeit a meager one, once again. Meager profits from meager inputs suggested a solution: scale up! At the right scale, small profits could be turned into sizable ones. I wasn’t wrong in seeing glittering value in those bags of apparel waste.
I also learned that the value of those bags of clothes wasn’t just tangible and measurable. Through the Mendwear process, I established and nourished relationships between local communities and their organizations of care. Mendwear created another bridge, another pathway between the Northeast Heights donors to The Common Good and the recipients of the picked, rejuvenated garments received by Whittier Elementary and the group clothing asylum-seekers out of an Episcopal church in Martineztown. The bridge was as ephemeral as spider’s silk, but just as strong—it had promise, even here in the ephemeral world of community-building.
If I had been able to scale it up, would those gossamer threads of relationship have multiplied as well, forming a web as strong as a spider’s?
In the metaphor, I was the spider, pulling threads between others. If Mendwear could scale up, and employ exponentially more Artist/Spiders… how many more webs of relationship might they all be able to spin?
At scale, what changes might such a project work upon America’s local communities?
2023 brought me a series of big mural projects, beginning with the maturation of the Vision Zero project—a process whose quagmire of Covid-based impacts in 2021 and 2022 had left me despairing of it ever coming to pass. In January 2023, when Vision Zero production planning was getting serious, I could see my future. I would return to murals, the medium I’d worked so hard to inhabit before and during Covid, because I loved it, and because it didn’t need to scale up to be profitable. Mendwear would fade into a dream I had one day, and that the grief I’d been feeling wasn’t just about all the losses of the pandemic and the Trump presidency. It was also about the end of getting fired up about big ideas.
It was also about getting older, and getting wiser. I need to make things with my hands. Call it a compulsion, call it a coping mechanism for a guy with mental health problems; call it discipline, or call it small-minded, I don’t care.
I can do without a lot. But I can’t do without making stuff.
I can’t do without the relationships that making stuff creates.
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