The Trenton Times published the following article on March 22, 2013. To read the full article, click here.

Armando Sosa displays his tapestries at Trenton City Museum

By Janet Purcell/For The Times of Trenton 
on March 22, 2013 at 6:07 AM, updated March 22, 2013 at 6:10 AM

Master weaver Armando Sosa was born and nurtured in a community in the highlands of Guatemala where 90 percent of the men were weavers.

He learned the skills of his elders so well that now, so many miles away, they are coming to a new fruition on a loom in his Hopewell studio.

Because operating a loom is hard physical work that requires the weaver to stand the entire time, it was work done by the men of the village, and Sosa moved naturally into that tradition from an early age.

“I learned just by watching my grandfather and my father and helping them,” he says. “As a little boy it was my job to make the spools and dress the loom with hundreds of cones of color before going to school. And it was my job when the newly dyed threads were laid to dry in the fields to help my father set up the threads and watch them as they dried so the cows that were grazing there didn’t come and trample them.

“I remember lying on the grass watching the sun, seeing all the colors,” Sosa adds. “It was a hard life because we did not have a lot of resources and money was very tight but, even though, that was my childhood and it was nice.”

Sosa works his memories into tapestries with intricate symbols in pure colors and gradients using silk, mercerized cotton and metallic threads. He often leaves open threads under the bottom dowel to show the color of the warp. Some are fringed at the bottom and, on occasion, some are delicately tasseled.

Drawing forth icons from the Mayan and pre-Columbian eras that were inherited by the culture in which he was raised, he works in the symbols and his own finely detailed designs which he first carefully lays out on graph paper.

“When I was a teenager, I was working with my uncle making weavings for the tourists who came to Guatemala,” Sosa says. “He taught me to work out every little design, every little part, on graph paper. That was the key to making them more intricate.”

Concentrating on the design he has laid out on the paper, he begins creating it in single gauge threads, one slim thread at a time, on a wooden loom he designed and built himself.

“I came here to work, to send money to my family back home,” he says. “I remember coming from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia on the midnight bus. I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking what can I do.

“I came to Princeton in 1994 and I met my partner (photographer and painter Karen McLean). I was looking at books and designs and my hands were itching to do something. I am not a carpenter but I started with the idea of making a loom, and Karen encouraged me to do it. It took me six months to make the first one from scrap, one piece to the other and always remembering.”

He pauses and says, “The most exciting thing was when I put the threads in, and it was doing what I was hoping to achieve, and then weaving these pieces.”

Visitors to the Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie and can see Sosa’s tapestries where, among the many on display, you’ll find “Carnival,” measuring 36 by 60 inches.

Figures in traditional festival costumes are woven into a pale gold warp. There are dancing figures, carnival floats and a ballerina with a devil perched on each shoulder and wearing a skirt that becomes a cage filled with birds.

Mixed Mayan and Venetian motifs are worked onto a turquoise warp in “Jaspe Veneciano,” including, among others, stylized masks of two goats seen facing one another and a girl jumping rope that transforms into a lily.

Sosa speaks of one special childhood memory that he says he still cherishes. “The first of November in Guatemala the people all celebrated the saints and all came with big kites to fly in the fields. I remember one November first when I was 7 years old and my father made me a huge kite and I took it out to the field to fly it.” His memories of that day are worked into a bright red warp in “Volando Barrilete en al Altiplano,” now on display in the Ellarslie exhibition.

“Each piece is one of a kind, and it’s like giving form to ideas and mixing beautiful designs that I remember from the Incas and Asia, from tapestries done in Europe,” Sosa says. “I think it’s about time to add new designs, different colors so we can continue to enjoy these things that were made thousands of years ago.

“Everything is so fast now, in the palm of our hands, and we tend to forget that things so beautiful have been made,” Sosa adds. “It is my desire to continue doing that for generations to come to see what we are able to do.”
To see Armando Sosa at work, go to youtube.com and enter armandososa, weaver.
Sosa’s tapestries are part of an exhibit at Ellarslie he shares with three other professional artists of varying disciplines, two of whom were also born abroad.

They are Japanese-American stone carver Ayami Aoyama, who is exhibiting her magnificent carvings; the late I-Hsiung Ju, a native of China, whose landscapes of China and America meld traditional and modern styles; and Philadelphia-born John McDevitt, whose sensuous stone and steel sculptures lend grace to the resistant materials from which they are made.

Also on display in the museum’s Malloy gallery is the David Bosted collection of wearable African art.

Armando Sosa, Weaver
When: 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 1-4 p.m. Sundays, through April 19. Closed Mondays and major holidays
Where: Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie, Cadwalader Park, Parkside and Stuyvesant avenues, Trenton
Contact: (609) 989-1191 or ellarslie.org