Bookstore / Yoffredo Activity Center
The Yoffredo Center Art Alcove featured artist for October and November is Concepción Poou Coy Tharin, a fabric artist from Tarpon Springs. She is a Q’eqchi’ Mayan woman from a village near Cobán, Guatemala. Taught by her mother and sister to weave at age eight, she has mastered her local style, an intricate gauze-like weave called pikb’il. Traditional backstrap weaving is one of the few sources of income for the women of her village, though each blouse takes a month to weave. By selling her textiles, Concepción was able to fund her education. With other women in her village she founded and was selected as the president of the village’s first women’s weaving cooperative. As such she helped start an association of artists and artisans of all kinds from her area. With them she participated in many festivals and demonstrations in Guatemala in an effort to secure weaving as a sustainable source of income. Now living in Florida, she demonstrates and teaches backstrap weaving, bringing this ancient tradition to life for people in the U.S. Her own textiles preserve traditional designs to honor her ancestors.
Concepción currently resides in Tarpon Springs and teaches classes in Mayan backstrap weaving at the Dunedin Fine Arts Center. She has done weaving demonstrations and made textiles that were featured in exhibitions, videos, and museum collections at places like the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology in Albuquerque.
