Worcester, Massachusetts benefits from a richness of refugee communities, adding to the city’s longtime history as a new home for immigrants from around the world. Over the last 30 years, forced migrant families now resettling in Worcester have included ones from Bhutan, Burma/Myanmar, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, and Syria. Refugees from Vietnam came to Worcester in the 1990s while new arrivals include families from Afghanistan. In the early 2000s, local arts advocates Ellen Ferrante and Joan Kariko noticed that some of the refugees (particularly elders) were highly skilled craft makers. Ferrante and Kariko founded Refugee Artisans of Worcester (RAW) in 2010 in order to partner with these remarkable craft makers.
RAW had three goals:
- To provide craft materials to the artisans and market their creations, returning at least 85% of the sales proceeds to the individual maker to empower them in financial ways.
- To help assure that the heritage crafts would endure and would be well documented for future generations.
- To partner with local colleges and universities to educate a broad public about refugee resilience and their exuberant craft production in the city.
All of this is also designed to foster the artisans’ pride in their intense artistic creativity, which so enhances Worcester art scenes. This digital archive, based on ethnographic interviews with the craft makers from 2017 forward, is a key part of the over all project, along with our goal of describing the artisans’ perceptions of art making in their lives first in their countries of origin, then in refugee camps, and now in Worcester in their new homes in resettlement.
RAW now collaborates with many artisans. As a 2020 exhibition title at the Worcester Center for Crafts put it, the artisans are “Crafting a New Home” in this second largest city in New England. Creating and selling heritage-based crafts and inventing innovative hybrid ones have become ways to find refuge and solace for the individuals and families we highlight here. We thank them all for their years’-long participation in this archive project.