SARAH DEFUSCO
VISUAL ART | Western Massachusetts, 2020
CULTURE HUB
MASS MoCA is one of the world’s liveliest centers for making and enjoying today’s most evocative art. With vast galleries and a stunning collection of indoor and outdoor performing arts venues, MASS MoCA is able to embrace all forms of art: music, sculpture, dance, film, painting, photography, theater, and new, boundary-crossing works of art that defy easy classification.
ARTIST
Sarah DeFusco is a visual artist who focuses on using design work and sustainability to express creative ideas. Sewing, screen printing, and painting are all vital to her practice. She is the co-founder of WallaSauce, a North Adams clothing-based brand that makes handmade products from up-cycled and alternative materials sourced mainly from secondhand sellers, giving new life to old things and turning what could be considered trash into fashionable, functional, and unique products.
SOCIAL IMPACT INITIATIVE
Northern Berkshire Community Coalition (nbCC) empowers, connects, convenes and supports communities in the Northern Berkshire region. With UNO Community Center and Park, nbCC has created a place where neighbors can build positive relationships with one another, teach others their talents, learn new skills, and work together to ensure that the community represented by UNO is a vibrant, caring, and safe place to live.
Sarah and her WallaSauce co-founder Andrew Casteel will teach a series of free classes to community members revolving around how to utilize sewing to one's own capabilities in order to up-cycle goods, fix and mend already purchased products, think creatively about materials, and overall practice a more sustainable lifestyle. This would allow anyone access to learning a new skill that could save them money, decrease their carbon footprint, and provide a place for mental escape. As Sarah notes, creating is therapy!
A final presentation of work created by community members in the classes will be shown at UNO or elsewhere and potentially auctioned, giving local participants a celebratory, culminating moment and chance to get their names out into the community, and tie themselves back into the roots of textile in North Adams. UNO Park stands across the street from where Arnold Print Works once operated, and Sarah believes it's important to educate the community about how the mill's practices impacted the economy in a positive way, but also the environment in an unsafe and negligent way.
Sarah’s goal is that in teaching these practices and skills, people will become more reliant on themselves and less reliant on large corporations and fast-fashion companies. “We want to see the community take care of itself as well as the environment and thrive like we know it can,” she says, “and we feel the potential is in our people.”