Location: Denver, CO
Mission:
Sustainability arts: a practice that includes methods for creating functional and aesthetic additions to an environment that utilize local biodegradable and upcycled human-made materials, in a way that withstands weathering, erosion, and time. The design forms take their inspiration from naturally occurring phenomena and interdependent systems of natural ecologies. The resulting creations are beautiful and generative, engaging the humans and the ecosystems in which they belong.
QTBIPOC: community members who are black, indigenous, and/or people of color that are also queer and/or trans
Looms of Liberation (LOL): project host
LOL QTBIPOC Sustainability Arts Fellowship: project requesting funding
Looms of Liberation is a collective in Southwest Denver that centers queer and POC voices and culture, cultivating the following shared values for members and the broader Denver QTBIPOC community: interdependence, autonomy, restoration, reciprocal relationships/cooperation, artistic agency, and generativity. The LOL QTBIPOC Sustainability Arts Fellowship is an educational and community organizing project that promotes community cohesion for the QTBIPOC community of Denver through community organizing tactics and group workshops.
Members of our collective were united by their dreams of one day being able to build sustainable structures that could be cohabitated by members in their community, as a way to push back on dominant societal structures that perpetuate the dangerous myth of rugged individualism. Currently, our system is set up to protect people of generational wealth and social privilege, while putting others in debt working to pay mortgages and/or rent their entire lives. When multiple marginalized identities are factors, this dream sold to the people feels even more out of reach, even impossible. We make this dream real and accessible for QTBIPOC.