Not just a pretty picture If you visit the Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences offices in West Coast Grocers, fourth floor, you will see a framed colorful tapestry depicting one of UW Tacoma’s iconic buildings, Garretson Woodruff Pratt. It’s an arpillera designed and hand-stitched by UWT alumna Suzanne Andre (IAS ’03) when she was enrolled in a class, “Women in the Global Economy.” Arpilleras, hand-sewn three-dimensional textile pictures, typically illustrate the stories of the lives of Latin American women. “Women couldn’t speak about loved ones being killed during political upheavals so they made pictures of the atrocities and hid them within pastoral scenes,” says Andre. She chose GWP as her tapestry’s subject because it represented something solid, something she felt strongly about: her education. “I developed a voice at UWT,” says Andre, who graduated from high school in 1975, married at 18, raised kids and helped her husband build a landscape business. She went to college for the first time in 1997, transferring from Pierce College as a Next Step Scholar to UW Tacoma, where she graduated magna cum laude and won two Haley writing awards. “At UWT I learned how to consider varied perspectives all at once. It opened my eyes to a new way of seeing and changed how I saw myself.” She says UW Tacoma’s transformation of old buildings, like GWP, parallels her own transformation through education.
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