16 minute read
In Shock
Kapurura holds a copy of Virgil Abloh’s book of quotes. Abloh is an American fashion designer and one of Kapurura’s biggest inspirations. Kapurura says Abloh, who passed in late 2020, combined a skating and street world style with that of high end brands like Louis Vuitton. To Kapurura, Abloh walked a path she hopes to follow.
Kapurura says, as a Black business owner, there were times when she didn’t feel comfortable taking up space. During quarantine, she began experimenting with unique and vibrant hair colors. “I feel like that was one of the ways I learned how to take up space,” she says. According to Kapurura, majoring in product design has also helped her realize she can exist within a non-conventional career path while remaining confident and finding success. acquaintance with similar artistic interests, and proposed a collaboration: a one-time clothing line to raise money for local activism causes.
Her proposal to Cobb was prompted by what she refers to as the “complete civil unrest” in 2020 as the Black Lives Matter Movement, Oregon wildfires and COVID-19 pandemic all coincided. It ignited a desire to use her skills to give back to her community.
In the following weeks, the pair started designing a line of clothing. It didn’t take long for them to connect with Salem local and fellow fashion enthusiast Austin Herndon, who organized pop-ups — short-term shopping spaces curated by local vendors. Herndon invited them to participate as designers in an upcoming event.
When the next pop-up rolled around, they showcased their designs under the name Philanthropy Phabrics for the first time. Vibrant African patchwork, line-drawn faces, hand-painted dragons and detailed distressing adorned the roughly 30 tops, pants and jackets they brought.
They received overwhelming excitement and support in response to their clothing. They chatted with friends and family coming to support them throughout the day, took photos with people purchasing items and accepted clothing drop-offs to be turned into custom pieces. By closing, over half of what they brought had sold. Realizing their potential, they agreed to take Philanthropy Phabrics and make it a business.
“Realizing people were willing to look at the clothing and loved the clothing and saw the artistic value in it was the moment when I realized ‘Dang, we can keep doing this,’” Kapurura says.
“It’s possible.”
Kapurura and Cobb form a perfectly balanced team, preferring different but complementary mediums. Cobb creates with vibrant colors and intricately painted designs inspired by Colombian fashion. Kapurura utilizes African patchwork, repetitive patterns and line drawings. More remarkable than that, she brings love and joy into each piece she creates — something she says is a hallmark of Zimbabwean culture. Her work with the brand has helped her redefine what it means to be an artist.
“Just the way that she sees things, the way that she creates, has been very inspiring for me,” says Cobb, a third-year business student at Oregon State University. Living in different cities, Kapurura and Cobb work independently on many of their
designs but come together for collaboration pieces, passing the design back and forth.
Philanthropy Phabrics has allowed Kapurura to “defi ne herself as a designer,” and it is already having an impact. In 2021, the two women donated to fi ve organizations, including the Black Youth PDX Movement, Marion Polk Food Share and Women’s Foundation of Oregon.
Philanthropy Phabrics’ mission is to be a sustainable brand, but Kapurura says the meaning of sustainability far surpasses just planetary health; it includes the people who live on the planet. She says donating to causes that uplift people and showing that the brand is there for the community directly is just as important to her as sourcing materials in a way that doesn’t harm the planet.
“Kundai believes that what she is doing, anybody else can do it, but she doesn’t realize how much talent she has,” her mother says.
Since launching the brand, Kapurura has fully embraced her title as a designer. She works as an art curator for a gallery in the EMU, takes on graphic design projects, expresses herself through fashion and experiments with mediums that may have seemed intimidating in the past.
Having peers and those younger asking her how she came up with the brand, if they can collaborate and admiring her work has helped her overcome doubts. It’s “one of the few markers of ‘you’re doing something right,’ and you’re showing people they can do it too,” she says.
She hopes to create space for people like her in the world of design, emulating the trails blazed by some of her biggest inspirations.
“I wouldn’t have the audacity that I do today if we didn’t have people like Virgil [Abloh] or Andre Leon Talley,” she says, “just people who are Black, who are women, who are fi rst-generation Americans in the industry.”
Nearing the end of a busy term, Kapurura sits across the table in a study room located just a short walk away from the sewing studio. She explains how as a Black woman, and one in business, there were certain things she felt that she couldn’t do or space she couldn’t take up in the past. With vibrant blue strands woven into her hair — something she would have considered too bold merely months ago — she says she feels like she’s learned to take up that space.
“I used to think that it took a name, or it took a famous piece to be an artist,” Kapurura says.
“But I think art is everywhere. It’s inside of us, and so everyone “But I think art is everywhere. It’s inside of us, and so everyone is an artist.” 40 | ETHOS | SUMMER 2022 SUMMER 2022 | ETHOS | 41 Kapurura says designing clothing for Philanthropy Fabrics has helped her explore herself and believe in her own abilities. “I feel like I’ve always had a creative mind, but I didn’t necessarily know how to express that,” she says. Kundai KapururaKundai Kapururaherself and believe in her own abilities. “I feel like I’ve always had a creative mind, but I didn’t necessarily know how to express that,” she says. SUMMER 2022 | ETHOS | 41
PROTESTING FOR
Year after year, a group of old friends gathers each week for peace in downtown Eugene. Written by Kendall Porter | Photographed by Natalie Myking | Illustrated by Lynette Slape
Walking up to the Eugene Public Library location downtown on a Saturday afternoon, the colorful flags held by a small group of protesters are almost immediately noticeable. Young children exiting the library hand-in-hand with their parents look mesmerized by the fluttering bright colors and crane their necks for better views of the spectacle. The designs range from a satellite view of Earth to a full-spectrum rainbow, but all carry the message of the phrase emblazoned on the side of the latter: peace.
The protestors talk amongst themselves, covering a range of topics from politics to the daily happenings in their lives. Some of them dress up for the occasion, donning a sock monkey button-up (that, it was noted, may have been intended as pajamas) or heart sunglasses.
When it rains, they huddle under the library’s awning, but they start parading around the street corner once the sun comes out, holding up signs and striking up conversations. Standing outside the library every Saturday from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. has become a part of their weekly routine. They’ve been doing it for the past 20 years.
The group of demonstrators does not have an official name, but it does have a long-established presence in the community of Eugene. The vigil first started in 2002 in protest of the bombings of Afghanistan after September 11, 2001, Trudy Maloney, a long-time protestor, says. In the beginning, the vigil was led by Peg Morton, a name that comes up frequently when talking to the group, although she has since passed.
Their focus has shifted over the past two decades, but their call for peace has remained the same.
“We’re just a bunch of old hippies who haven’t given up yet,” Julie Lambert, the “baby” of the group, says.
While they know that they can’t change what’s going on in the world, Ed Necker says being there — outside the library each week — is something they can do.
The group end’s each vigil with a repeated mantra that they adapted from a Buddhist prayer:
May all beings be happy. May all beings be well. May all beings be safe. May all beings be free. Peace, peace, peace.
Trudy, 73, remembers when she and Peg stood outside the Federal Building twice a week, every week. Numbers slowly dwindled from the larger demonstrations until it was just the two of them.
“In the beginning, people would yell at me, spit at me,” Trudy says. “My father told me, ‘Stand up for what you believe in, even if you stand alone.’”
In those days after September 11, 2001, Trudy says, peace was not on people’s lists. After Peg got arrested during a different demonstration, a semi-frequent occurrence in her life, Trudy followed through on her father’s words. She stood alone.
A group of protestors stands outside the Eugene Public Library. Even though the group doesn’t have an official name, they have been meeting for one hour every Saturday for the past 20 years. Rain or shine, the group protests for peace.
Karen Stingle has been involved with the library protest for around 10 years. Stingle’s father was in the Foreign Service. In turn, she lived in several locations throughout her life. She got involved in activism while living in DC during high school. “My father was overseas at the time. I started doing peace marches and stuff ,” Stingle says. “He got kind of uptight about how I was questioning our government, but I’ve always felt like that was the right thing to do.”
Even before moving to Eugene, Trudy’s history with activism dates back to her adolescence. She lived in Chicago during the protests outside of the Democratic National Convention in 1968 — a protest against the Vietnam war where the phrase “the whole world is watching” was born. It was a police riot, she says, and she called the offi cers who retaliated against them pigs.
She fi rst remembers feeling like she had to speak up when she was around 15 years old. She grew up in a wealthy suburb of Chicago with “too much,” she says. When traveling with her stepmother to the Museum of Science and Industry through Hyde Park, where a riot had taken place, she saw a young child playing in a vacant lot full of glass. The child barely had enough clothes on. When Trudy got home, she layed on her bed and cried, not understanding why the world was so unfair.
“I can’t be complacent,” Trudy says. “I can’t say that I don’t care. I wish I could. Many times in my life I wish that I could just turn a blind eye and not care, but I do care. I care passionately.”
Throughout her life she’s carried the image of that young child with her. It “shocked me out of complacency,” she says.
Trudy strongly believes that “we were created by love to love.” To her, that means doing what she can do on her feet to “walk the talk.”
“I feel that whatever good you put out is something good,” Trudy says. “No matter what it looks like, every action has a reaction. And when you put out love, it’s a good thing to do. And it feels good.”
Since 2002, in front of the old Federal Building, Ed Necker has joined his wife, Trudy, in demonstrating each week. Today, he holds a sign reading “Vietnam Veteran For Peace.”
“We’re the vigilantes, and he’s the vigil-uncle,” Trudy says due to the fact that he is often the only man in the group predominantly made up of women.
Being a veteran himself, Ed says that wars are unnecessary and wrong. While fi ghting in Vietnam, he says, it became obvious to him that it was commercially-driven and didn’t have anything to do with the people actually fi ghting in it. As long as there is war, he feels a responsibility to speak out against it. He also says that his experience as a veteran speaks to a lot of people who respect him for what he did and listen to his perspective because of it.
For Karen Stingle, joining the group is a way that she can remind people that peace is important, but that we don’t have it yet. She fi rst started joining around 10 years ago through her best friend, Jean Murphy, but has felt drawn back to it each week. She says she’s always liked the colorful fl ags and the friendly people, and, of course, the concept of peace.
“It’s just a nice little community of people,” Karen said. “I like that we’re reminding people that we need to work for peace. It doesn’t just come naturally.”
Peace is a really obvious thing, in a way, she says, and yet it is something that the world still does not have. Karen attended the fi rst vigil in response to the war in Ukraine outside of the old Federal Building, where she was given a button of the country’s fl ag, something she has worn “nonstop” since. Wearing it around has been a conversation starter, she says. One day, when it rained during the group’s weekly demonstration, she coordinated her yellow raincoat and blue umbrella to further show her solidarity.
For many group members, the weekly meeting serves as a chance to talk with like-minded people while expressing and supporting a message they believe in.
“It’s a comfort knowing that I’ll see these people and that we have this in common and that we’re all working towards peace
Trudy Maloney, left, and Ed Necker have been married for 23 years and participate in the peace protests together at the Eugene Library. Maloney has been an activist since she was a teenager and convinced Necker to protest after they met. Necker is a Vietnam War veteran and quickly realized that he was against the idea of war while he was serving. “War sucks,” Necker says. “My sign says ‘Vietnam veteran for peace’ and people respect and relate to that. I don’t believe in war; I believe in peace,” Necker says.
in whatever way we can,” Karen says. “We’re pretty dedicated to showing up for this, and that just makes me feel good.”
Julie says that over time she’s come to know all of the people in the group and feels bonded to them through their weekly ritual. She knows if someone is sick or unable to make it and knows when it’s someone’s birthday. People show up whether it’s cold or rainy to not break the tradition.
“It’s like everybody is special,” Julie says. “We talk a whole lot of the time we’re there. We catch up on each other’s lives and share that. It’s not just a peace vigil. It’s also a way of having like-minded people come together and experience some community inclusion that is, in a way, empowering.”
Helen Liguori, 93, typically demonstrates on the corner across the street to better spread the message through visibility. She carries a sign that says “War Is A Dead End” and points it to the side of the street with cars stopped at a red light. She enjoys socializing but is ultimately there for peace.
Since moving back outside of the library once it opened up to the public again, the small group has found that it is not uncommon for people to stop by and strike up conversations, one of the reasons they prefer the library location.
But during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the group met outside the corner of a credit union on 29th and Willamette. The location was decided when a member living in the Cascade Manor retirement community could no longer ride the bus out of concern for her health. Rather than forcing her to choose between attending the demonstrations and personal safety, the group decided to bring the vigil to her.
During the height of the pandemic, Karen says, they got lots of attention from the traffi c, from beeps to peace signs. But there was very little personal interaction, which was appropriate given the circumstances, Karen says.
Outside of the library, however, people stop by for a multitude of reasons. On one Saturday, a young man with red hair and an eclectic outfi t of a Fila pullover and two-toned “good vibes” sweatpants stuck around and off ered up fi st bumps and peace signs. He took up Jean’s off er of the extra fl ag, and the two conversed for the remainder of the hour.
Ed says that people have also come up in disagreement, saying that war is “inevitable” and should be supported, but the response is much more often supportive and thankful. When there is a dispute with passersby, one of the other members typically steps in to talk it out with both parties.
People approach to tell personal stories as well, speaking about their experiences with growing up in military families and their distaste for military recruitment tactics. After asking what they were protesting for, one canvasser expressed his frustrations with people only concerned about war when it is facing countries in Europe, to which the members within earshot agreed. He stayed with the group for the remainder of the hour, promising to return the next week.
For Julie, seeing everything going on in the world, the stories coming out of warzones, can be extremely overwhelming.
“I can’t do anything to stop it,” she says. “But what I can do, what I keep doing, is advocating for peace. It’s a small thing, I understand that, and it’s mostly symbolic, but it’s putting that energy out into the world.”
While she isn’t necessarily close to what is happening globally, she is close to her own community, and that is where she can start to make an impact, she says.
In mid-May, to expand their group, Helen worked to put the meeting time back onto the events section of the Eugene Weekly, where they used to announce their meetings a couple of years ago. The group whirred with excitement for the future, with at least one person mentioning the news to each latecomer that trickled in.
MAY ALL BEINGS BE FREE. PEACE, PEACE, PEACE.”
-Protestor’s Mantra
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