This exhibition endeavours to tell the living stories of garment workers and their leadership to honour their labour, lives, resistance, joys, and triumphs, and to pass on their stories of collective organizing, community led action and mutual aid practices to the next generation of future workers. Garment workers are empowered agents who lead systemic change to better their lives and labour throughout the global garment industry through collective organizing, direct action, community building, and sweatshop abolition. These collective acts of resistance by the rising majority reverberate like a mighty thunder expanding and enduring across time and space, embodying the revolutionary spirit of garment workers past, present and future. Can you hear the resounding roar of tens of millions of garment workers echoing across oceans, land, geographies, languages, and time, driven by revolutionary love and conviction, with fists raised high demanding a just recovery and deserving futures, “¡Adelante Siempre!” Forward! Forever!
We invite you to join us in person for the opening reception on Sept 3rd, from 7-9 pm. Please read our COVID protocols HERE. You won’t need to pre-register, but we will ask you to download a screening questionnaire on arrival. Since our capacity is limited, there might be a little wait to get in although we don’t anticipate it.
ABOUT
Garment Worker Center is a worker rights organization leading an anti-sweatshop movement to improve conditions for tens of thousands of Los Angeles garment workers. Through direct organizing, GWC develops leaders who demand enforcement of strong labor laws and accountability from factory owners, manufacturers, and fashion brands. We center immigrant workers, women of color, and their families who are impacted by exploitation in the fashion industry.
Microfinance Opportunities is a global non-profit committed to understanding the economic realities of low-income and marginalized people. By describing and analyzing these realities we inform the policies and practices of government, the private sector, multilateral organizations, civil society, and low-income and marginalized people themselves. We do this through the collection, analysis, and visualization of data, and the dissemination of the results through interactive and engaging materials and education efforts.
Our Garment Worker Diaries initiative in Bangladesh is currently active and conducting telephone-based interviews with 1,300 garment workers a week. Our goal is to understand how they are living and working during the global COVID-19 crisis.
Meera Sethi is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose affective, research-based practice explores the body, dress, garments, and materiality from critical, feminist, and anti-colonial perspectives. She engages drawing, painting, fibre, illustration, and performance to think through migration and its relationship to fashion, care, embodiment, and self. Meera’s work is in the permanent collection of the Royal Ontario Museum and the Wedge Collection and has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Mississauga, and the L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival among other venues.
Hitoko Okada is a fibre artist, community arts organizer and curator currently living in Hamilton, Ontario. She began her social practice as a community arts organizer and facilitator twenty years ago in her hometown in East Vancouver. Since then she has programmed community-based art festivals and art-based workshops including workshops for community-led campaigns. As a fibre artist, Okada has publicly presented textile-based installation work since 1999. She is currently developing a research-based body of work exploring the history and ancestral knowledge of cultural heritage craft of Japanese indigo, kakishibu dye, and shifu weaving, supported by the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council of the Arts
WAHC wishes to acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Hamilton, the Province of Ontario, CUPE, the Provincial Building and Construction Trades Council of Ontario, and the Canada Council for the Arts for their support of our exhibitions and ancillary programs.
For more information, please contact Sonali Menezes, Programming and Exhibitions Specialist, at (905) 522-3003 ex. 29 or sonali@wahc-museum.ca.
The Garment Worker Protection Act Poster is by artists Nicolas Zuñiga and Emmanuel Soriano, permission to alter the image from the Garment Worker Center.
