The Beehive Collective

The Beehive Collective: full time volunteers based in Machias, making some incredible sociopolitically inspired tapestries. They restored local grange hall as their home, and have turned it back into a community center. They go on tour with their tapestries, exhibiting them at colleges and being paid in honoraria. They also show their work at high schools, where they get their bigger impact: usually when they exhibit at colleges, the students who show up are "the choir", and don't need to be preached to. To say these folks are liberal is analogous to saying the weather this year has been crappy. The next tapestry they are working on has mountaintop removal as its theme.

The tapestry in front of me stretches diagonally across the room, about thirty feet, and it depicts the political and social conditions in Colombia, as influenced by geopolitical and historical events. Directly in front of me there is an ant colony, where worker ants seem to be reading about organizing labor, watching television, plotting military strategy, and other activities. Different corporate labels (Monsanto, Chiquita, BP, Coca Cola, DynCorp, Ford) find their ways into the tapestry, and not in the most flattering of light.

I've seen these folks exhibiting at Common Ground before, but never really stopped to find out about what their story was.

This could be a really cool way to have students tell human stories in ways that make sense to them. It is interesting to watch these kids opening up a little bit, explaining what they see in the symbolism and imagery of the tapestry. This would be a really cool way to have kids show what they know in an interdisciplinary unit. (Joe, you feelin' me? Amity? Mike?)


Mission statement of the Beehive Collective: "to cross-pollinate the grassroots".