Everyone has a story, so why not tell it on a T-Shirt?

It seems that’s what Mike Fretto and Chris Lewis (founders of Rosa Loves) were thinking when they began this non-profit in 2006. So far, they’ve helped a woman who couldn’t walk get a walker, a seaweed farmer get a boat and a grandmother get a house after hers burned down. They’ve given South African kids the opportunity to continue surfing with better supplies and Mexican students scholarships which were previously non-existent.

How does it work? They get wind of people or communities in need, design a T-shirt to represent the need and give back a percentage of the T-Shirt sales to alleviate or diminish the need.

Their mission:

We hope to encourage individual people to get involved in the community around them on a somewhat tangible scale. We will accomplish this by providing financial support to those in need by infiltrating the t-shirt industry with a new perspective of how clothing can serve a purpose other than outfitting. Everyone has a story. Everyone has a need. By using art and creativity, we hope to foster hope and encouragement through the aid of apparel. Each story will be told through stimulating graphics and actual text that will appear on the inverse of the shirt directly in line with the heart, where the Rosa Loves movement stems from.

And of course they only use fair-trade quality clothing, “in order to promote the love and proper financial support around the world.”

Here’s the story of Made (the seaweed farmer from Indonesia):

Story by: Eric Hires
October 2, 2006

My friend Made is a 30-year-old seaweed farmer and fisherman. He is one of the most kind-hearted and giving people that I have ever met. He has a wife and two beautiful children. A third child, a son, passed away when he was only three.

When I was on Nusa Lembongan I would go and visit Made and he would teach me Indonesian. One day I bought him ice cream because I wanted him to enjoy a simple luxury that he can rarely afford. He refused to eat it though; instead he took it home and gave it his kids. The next day he asked if I wanted to go fishing with him and of course I said yes. We went way out in the ocean and caught seven tuna - the other men said that this was a good catch. Made sold five of them for the equivalent of one dollar each, and gave two to his wife, which she began to grill over an open fire. They insisted that I stay and eat, so we sat around in their hut and pulled hunks of fish off with our right hands while shooing thousands of flies away with our left. We laughed as we did our best to communicate in our broken dialects. They bought me a Sprite, which is a big deal when you live on less than one dollar a day. I felt honored to eat with them and to be their home , where they treated me like an honored guest.

Made, like many of the men in Nusa Lembongan, is a seaweed farmer and a fisherman. This is how he provides for his family. Made and his family are very poor, even by Indonesian standards. The boat that Made took me fishing on was not his own. He doesn’t own a boat, but has to borrow a boat anytime he wants to fish or tend to his seaweed harvest. If Made had his own boat, not only would he be the happiest guy in Indonesia, but he would also be able to fish and harvest his seaweed on his own time. This would allow him to bring in more money and hopefully be able to provide his children with simple luxuries that we take for granted, like ice cream or education. A new boat would cost about $2500 USD. It would be something very special if we could raise the money to buy Made and his family their own boat. It would be a tangible way to show them the love of Jesus.

This is a beautiful idea. Buy a T-Shirt.

I just heard a guy say what I think adequately sums up the state of our nation: “We are more known for our disunity than our unity. We are more known for what we’re against than what we’re for.” To elaborate on his statement with my own thoughts: it seems that we divide ourselves based on religious affiliations, social classes, race and general opinions.

While it is important to me to develop a solid worldview, I want to be about listening and hearing the thoughts and approaches to life that others embrace. How else will I prove to people that I love them more than I disagree with their sentiments?

Here’s an absolutely beautiful example of two artists who’ve taken this thinking a giant step further. JR and Marco launched, in essence, a strategically placed photography campaign that forces Palestinians and Israelis to let go of their ethnocentric views (at least a little) and come Face2Face with their similarities.

Rather than try to explain their wonderful idea, here’s a excerpt from their website:

When we met in 2005, we decided to go together in the Middle-East to figure out why Palestinians and Israelis couldn’t find a way to get along together.

We then traveled across the Israeli and Palestinian cities without speaking much. Just looking to this world with amazement. This holy place for Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This tiny area where you can see mountains, sea, deserts and lakes, love and hate, hope and despair embedded together. After a week, we had a conclusion with the same words: these people look the same; they speak almost the same language, like twin brothers raised in different families.

A religious covered woman has her twin sister on the other side. A farmer, a taxi driver, a teacher has his twin brother in front of him. And he is endlessly fighting with him.

It’s obvious, but they don’t see that.

We must put them face to face. They will realize.

We want everyone to laugh and think when they see the portrait of the other and their own portrait.

The Face2Face project is to make portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same job and to post them face to face, in huge formats, in unavoidable places on both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides. In a very sensitive context, we need to be clear. We are in favor of a solution for which two countries, Israel and Palestine would live peacefully within safe and internationally recognized borders. All the bilateral peace projects (Clinton/Taba, Ayalon/Nussibeh, Geneva Accords) are converging in the same direction. We can be optimistic. We hope that this project will contribute to a better understanding between Israelis and Palestinians.

Today, “Face to face” is necessary. Within a few years, we will come back for “Hand in hand”.

He talks about the way he uses gold pigment on paper. The gold to point to divinity and the paper to point to humanity.

He agrees with the Japanese when they associate beauty with death; the minerals he uses for pigment must be “pulverized to bring out their beauty.” And it seems he believes that art has a role far beyond wall decor, coffee tables or even fuel for politically correct coffee house conversations.

At least this is what I’ve gathered by studying Makoto Fujimura’s essays, his art and his life in general.

Through his art, Fujimura has fused Japanese techniques with Western abstract expressionism. He was not only honored as the youngest artist to ever have a piece acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, but has also founded the International Arts Movement, the goal of which is to help artists work for the renewal of their culture.

Most interesting to me is what seems to drive his creativity. In his essay “Beauty without Regret,” he states:

Art cannot be divorced from faith, for to do so is to literally close our eyes to that beauty of the dying sun setting all around us. Death spreads all over our lives and therefore faith must be given to see through the darkness, to see through the beauty of “the valley of the shadow of death”.

Our culture, as it grows in cynicism is increasingly unwilling to listen to words. Differing viewpoints, divisive politics and liars for leaders have all played a part in our candid and open apathy. Art, according to Fujimura, is a way to recapture communication in our melting pot:

As we engage culture we need to be authentic, not slick and savvy. People are used to slick advertising campaigns, but they hunger for authenticity and grace. Before the 20th century, artists asked, “How do we depict a flower?” Then in the 20th century it changed to, “What is a flower?” And now the question is, “Can we even ask a question?” Because we’re in a time when everything has to be deconstructed and fragmented, even language itself is not trusted. So artists are asking questions about the nature of reality and the origin of language. They’re going back to the roots of why we do the things we do and asking who is responsible, who is the author.

The author is God.

Many times, I have grown frustrated at the start of paintings because I want my work to be exact replicas of my visions. I saw a gray sky and wanted to capture it on canvas, but was unable to mix my colors to the perfect natural monochrome. I saw a photograph in a marketing magazine of a girl in a red dress slumped against a green wall. I wanted to paint her thoughts, but could never seem to get into her head. The picture in the magazine wasn’t offering the thousand words it was supposed to. I ended up painting what looked like a floating red cat instead of the beautiful expression of loneliness I was aiming for.

I think my frustration comes from my desire for my work to be meaningful, to evoke emotions in its viewer and (on some selfish level) to provoke change.

When I throw paint on a canvas without a cause, I’m cheating.

Art should be so much more than an artist’s attempt to pass sloppy color combinations off as ingenuity and modernity. Music should be more than a lucky Garage Band experience, a musician’s attempt to pass screaming off as angst-ridden brilliance. Poetry, good poetry, should be more than rhythm and meter and rhyme. And, in my humble opinion, a person who expresses themselves through any art form should do so for the cause of beauty and nothing else.

Here’s Fujimura’s Costly Grace. What do you think?