Ibulliance: Outrageously Uzbek
A Story of Two Friends
Cultures don't have to collide. Sometimes, they sidle up to each other and walk a way together; they listen with gentle, curious eyes and learn from the movement of each other's hands, and put those hands to work on a third thing together, maybe rubbing shoulders in the task, until one day two of those hands slip together in a kind of side-by-sideness. When disaster rounds the corner, they hold each other up through that windy fear until, in its passing, they both emerge stronger—if only for not being alone. They begin to laugh freely, and in that laughter is the beginning of love. They want to bring others to meet their new friend and sit down for plov together and feast. At that communal dinner, then, there is not the wreckage of a collision, but something more like the confluence of two rivers flowing, and below the surface, the great power of women, churning.
Muhayo is such a river, flowing from the heart of Uzbekistan, a sparkling face I met ten years ago at the festive International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe. We kept the glow of our meeting alive through writing, and by the next summer sat down together for coffee and a bit of dreaming and designing. I marveled at her sketches; she traced new ones from my imaginings, then went home to Tashkent to experiment with them for Ibu. You loved them. Two years later, with mutual friends, I traveled to see her in her studio, to meet her team of women crafting beauty in an enterprise she founded, Bibi Hanum.
Top Row: Susan and Muhayo meeting at Santa Fe International Folk Art Market in 2015; designing in Santa Fe in 2016; visiting in Tashkent in 2018. Bottom Row: visiting Muhayo's new store in Tashkent last month; fitting one of our Ibu Adventurers; Bibi Hanum showroom in Tashkent.
When covid tried to take her work down, orders drying up in a cruel reversal of spring, Ibu kept orders flowing; you kept them flying off our shelves; and together we issued a grant so that Muhayo could to keep the workspace lights on, the rent paid. Eventually, recovering in the long months that followed, Muhayo flowed right past that big boulder in the river, brought all of the work to her home, and saved to build a shop all of their own.
Earlier this month, I was among 22 Ibu allies visiting Muhayo in her luminous new space, recently completed and radiant with success. A shining first floor retail space, second floor workspace for the women I now recognized, if only by their beautiful gold-tipped smiles; and above it, a white plaster rooftop for events and exhibits to highlight their work. To see Muhayo again, greeting us with morning sweets and tea, moving among our group, fitting these pants just so, this jacket; speaking of the ways we held one another through the dark eddies, and witnessing this flowing brightness of her life—this was not merely joy to me. I think it is the heart of Ibu.
Touring Muhayo's beautiful new store and workroom, before (2018) and after(2024) a long covid challenge, and visiting the same women still working together after eight years.
Ibu makes a lot of magic, but the magic that moves me most is the way we've sidled up to our partners, side by side, and learned from them, and witnessed their lives, and worked together over years—Marisa with patterns and colors designing, Lasley telling the story, Sarah offering the product, and, you, a community of allies coming to the table, so to speak. It's the beautiful proximity of two cultures working side by side that moves me—rubbing shoulders until our hands slip gracefully into one another's. It's friendship across continents that have slowly broken down barriers rather than colliding with them. It's rivers twining, and women, the world over, beginning to silently roar and tumble like white rapids over all that has tried to stop them, and now, has failed.
With Gratitude,
Susan Hull Walker
Creative Director + Founder
