Fair Trade for Huichol Art

Shortly after my last post I came across this video on YouTube. It is a great example of the kind of organisation that Karuna Village wants to work with to help them fulfill their aim to help indigenous groups like the Huichol get a fair price for their art. The Konshak Foundation was formed to help the Huichol Indians to market their art at a fair market price, and to "create new fusion of contemporary art".

The video very succinctly highlights the plight of the Huichol and how such organisations as the Konshak Foundation can be of help without being overtly intrusive. This is a great example of what amazing good the internet is capable of facilitating - a subject I would like to delve into further some time.
Enjoy!

Origin of the Idea

Photo by Dave Kellet

The germ of the idea for setting up a fair trade fine art business began back in November 2005 when Naomi and I were on a short cruise holiday along the Mexican Riviera. One of our ports of call was Puerto Vallarta where the ship docked for the day and we went into town to explore. Puerto Vallarta has a very good market, and that is where we headed for. We discovered a little shop at the edge of the market which sold Huichol art, which consisted of brightly coloured 'yarn paintings' and beadwork. I'll go into more detail about the art produced by the Mexican Huichol Indians in a later post, but suffice it to say we were immediately drawn to this artwork.

Earlier on in our trip we had attended a timeshare presentation, for which 'torture' we were compensated with a gift of $100 cash. Well, it happened that the particular piece of Huichol art we were drawn to cost exactly $100, so we figured what better use could we put that money to than to purchase this wonderful piece? (As illustrated in the picture).

We chatted with the propietor, Ricardo, and it turned out that the shop was part of a nonprofit organisation set up to promote the art of the Huichol Indians so that they had both a source of income in what were very poor mountain villages and, at the same time keeping alive their unique folk art traditions. The thing that interested me at the time was when he showed us photographs of of the villages and some of the artists at work. The Huichol Indians live in round huts. I was, at that time, involved in a project building replica round houses of the British Iron Age and so this was, to me, an amazing coincidence. Ricardo said that if we were ever in Puerto Vallarta again he would arrange a visit to the Huichol villages and introduce us to the artists. We vowed then and there that we would, at some point in the future, take him up on his kind and generous offer.

Our thoughts then were that this was great art and that there would be a great market for this quality of work back in the US and Britain. That thought remained in the back of our minds and thus was born the germ of the idea to set up a fair trade fine art business.