“My goal is to make this an American tradition.” (w/ Jayna Zweiman, founder of the Welcome Blanket Project, co-founder of the Pussyhat Project)
Looking for a way to build community and make political change using your artistic skills or an interest in crafting?
Jayna Zweiman was an architect recovering from a life-changing head and neck injury when she found the knitting and crocheting community. It became a critical part of her recovery, and, ultimately, activism. Since then she’s founded multiple projects focused on giving crafters a political community that helps educate people through art and provides real, tangible resources to people in need. After co-founding the Pussyhat Project in 2016, she created the Welcome Blanket Project, which gives knitters the chance to create blankets that are turned into educational exhibits, then sent to refugees and asylum seekers through a network of organizations serving the immigrant community. Jayne talks about the logistics of starting and managing a project of this scope, the challenges of making that project sustainable in the long-run, and the joys of creating political communities that welcome introverts.
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Credits:
To the best of our knowledge, all audio used by What Can I Do is in the public domain or is used with permission. Our theme song is Good Deeds by Serj Anto, and we hold a license for use of the song through PremiumBeat.
Original artwork is by Matthew Weflen and used with express permission.
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Jayna Zweiman
Jayna Zweiman is an architecturally-trained multidisciplinary designer and social entrepreneur. Her independent practice combines architecture, art, craft and new media to focus on experiences that overlap physical, virtual and conceptual spaces. Her work is about civic intimacy, accessibility, and joy.
Perhaps best known as the co-creator/co-founder of Pussyhat Project, an international network and movement of women’s rights supporters, Zweiman has become a leading advocate of using design innovation to enact social change. Zweiman’s innovations in craftivism have been rooted in design strategies to make spaces and systems for people to connect through craft.
The Pussyhat Project became a worldwide phenomenon at the 2017 Women’s Marches as one of the largest crowd-sourced art advocacy projects ever. Through its global adoption, the Pussyhat has become an international symbol of women’s rights and the resistance.
She is the creator and founder of Welcome Blanket, what began as a reconceptualization of the 2000-mile length of the proposed border wall as a 2000-mile length of yarn to make individual welcome blankets for new immigrants coming to the United States. This crowd-sourced collective has been so successful that the project has expanded to reframe the 24,901 mile Earth’s circumference as a distance that connects us all.
She received her AB from Brown University in visual arts and economics and her Masters in Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
She lives and works in Los Angeles, and is the pr… Read More
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