3 Questions

with Gregory Waits

(Carolyn Parrs)

By Julie Ann Grimm

Gregory Waits, architect, artist and creator of the Blue Jeans Project, is hoping you'll stop by Fresh Santa Fe (2855 Cooks Road) during the AHA Festival's Siler Road Block Party on Saturday from 5 to 9 pm. The theme is "The Art of the Machine," so this project, which uses recycled denim, fit right in. There will even be a dramatic multimedia performance at 9 pm.

Tell us about what you are doing at the block party.
The performances are really to augment and bring more excitement as well as thematic content to the Blue Jeans Project, so it is a way of promoting it a little bit more, I guess. It's more than promotion. It is definitely a way that we talk more about how these objects that are going be made out of a process of recycling, and the performance itself is also about a process of recycling.

Have you been at this for very long?
We opened the Blue Jean Project last year when Waits' Studio Works opened up, and it opened up at last year's MIX event. We collect jeans, used jeans, from anyone. We want to get as many as possible; it's a community project in that way, and we transform the jeans into blankets and the like. We transform the jeans into blankets, and the blankets are donated to youth shelters so they can have some really beautiful objects there.

What's the process like?
It's kind of like a collage patchwork of different denims and other donated objects. We work with a collective down in Albuquerque, where there are about 20 women who do the sewing. It's a collective where the woman has trained a number of homeless [people] to sew, and they've gotten really good at it, so that is who is actually sewing the blankets right now. We'll have one blanket finished for the show, and that blanket will be up for donation and then given to the shelter...We are starting to run out of jeans. It takes 20-30 jeans to make a blanket. So we want people to bring their old jeans that are sitting around in a drawer not being used, because the whole thing is to recycle these objects that are just taking up space.

Santa Fe Reporter

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