Puti
The artist got his start as a slam poet and stage actor using the stage name Pooty. As he traveled around the world and expanded his craft from the stage to sewing and painting, the name evolved. Called “T” by his friends, Puti’s tells stories about energy, history, and connections.
My Vision
Art is my life.
Creative Process
I draw inspiration from nature, everyday life, and dreams.
Becoming a sewist
Taking a discarded version of myself and rebuilding something better.
The transition from performer to sewist was sudden and slow. I had to rethink how to express myself without a stage and without the crew with whom I'd performed for two decades.
Sewing
High end fashion from discarded textiles.
Drawing the connection between a commodity crop transported in a low-value sack that was once the foundation for empires, and global travel, immigration, and how we create and assign values.
Performance
Slam Poetry & Nouchi
I grew up in a community full of proud Africans educated in the French system, and surrounded by immigrants and tourists. Our language, the language of the streets, is Nouchi. It provides the rhythm for slam poetry and a beat for dance.
painting
making sense
I draw inspiration from the calculations we make every second of every day. New showcase on the horizon.
Cap et Chino
Reimagine coffee bags as couture
Puti’s premiere collection celebrates coffee sacks. Woven from jute, often grown in India and Bangladesh, these bags carry the raw coffee beans to a roastery where the beans transform from bland, green, and raw to shiny, dark, and aromatic. While we celebrate coffee: the caffeine, the rituals, even the farmers get their efforts highlighted now and again, the jute farmers and weavers are a forgotten piece of the coffee journey.
Puti chose to work with the discarded jute sacks to highlight the transatlantic journey of the jute bags, the critical role they play in the global food economy, but that they are disposable to the community at large once the coffee bean journey ends. As a world traveler himself, hailing from the coffee and chocolate-growing regions of Cote d’Ivoire, the ease with which the coffee bags are disposed struck him.
The Cap et Chino runway show at Union Craft Brewing highlights the coffee bags with cotton fabrics from west Africa and flannels from North America; buttons and decorations include cowrie shells and pawpaw seeds.
