Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Centre

The Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Centre is located not too far from the great pyramids of Giza in Egypt. It was founded in 1952 to teach young children to weave tapestries. I can't even begin to do justice to the story of the school -- which I visited in mid-September, shortly before departing Egypt -- but I love this quote by Ramses Wissa Wassef:

"I had this vague conviction that every human being was born an artist, but that his or her gifts could be brought out only if artistic activity was encouraged from early childhood by way of practising a craft... The creative energy of the average person is being sapped by a conformist system of education and the extension of industrial technology to every sphere of modern life."

Wissa Wassef was an architect and he designed the school. These domes are done in the Nubian style of Upper Egypt. Can you imagine working in a gorgeous place like this?

The weavers (adults now) use these large looms to create the wool tapestries. They can work either horizontally or vertically, and as they go the work is rolled onto the lower bar, so they never see the entire work until it is finished. They never use any cartoon or drawing, but instead improvise as they go along. You read that correctly - this work is improvised, even though they can only see the small section that they are working on, which may even be sideways, such as the one in the next picture.

The weavers can work on each image independently.

This was my absolute favorite tapestry. It's called Wool Dying and was made by Rada Mohammed. All the wool used in the tapestries is dyed by vegetables that are grown at the school. This tapestry depicts each step in the process of growing the vegetables, harvesting them, dying the wool in the vats and then hanging the wool to dry.

See the women carrying baskets and bales balanced on their heads? It's still quite common to see that in Egypt, particularly the rural areas.

This tapestry depicts a camel market.

And this final one was a huge landscape, obviously done by a very experienced weaver. If I remember correctly, it took the artist a year and a half to create.

My favorite part of it was the men climbing the palm trees to get the dates.

And here is a date palm right outside in the garden. Compare the two photos and see how fabulously the weaver depicted the trunk of the palm and the fruit.

And a final picture of the backsides of some cotton weaving. I was fascinated by all the threads hanging out. I suspect they will be woven in with a needle to finish them up.

I highly recommend the article Threads of Life: A Journey in Creativity to learn more about the school's founding and how these works of art are created. There's also excellent info in this article here.