Magical Web Weaver: Dee Dee Gomes

I saw Dee Dee Gomes’ art before I met her.

I stood in front of the intricately knotted hanging of white wool and twine, twisted and twirled across a piece of driftwood with air plants placed sporadically, naturally through a variety of open spaces, and my mouth must have fallen open. Wow.

“Would you like to meet the artist?” a woman asked me. I was at an art auction April 1st thrown by PS295, an elementary school in the South Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. I just nodded. A few minutes later, Dee Dee stood in front of me, clad in a pink silk jacket exactly like the Shawn Cassidy one I coveted of my neighbor’s back in the 70s. Her cool harem pants, her draping silk blouse and her many necklaces drew me in almost as much as her warm engaging smile. Again, wow.

She and her friends, all moms from PS295 who had put the fundraiser together, danced wild and free that night to the intense beat of electronic music and incredible drumming played by a wild man I was to learn later was Dee Dee’s husband, Gilmar Gomes, the longtime percussionist of Spanish pop star Enrique Iglesias.

Over coffee, when we got together at Couleur Café in Park Slope, just over a month later, Dee Dee explained how the two met back in Germany in 2000, when she was 29, at a salsa concert when Gomes was on tour with Brazilian singer Daniela Mercury.

“He saw me dancing on stage, and said to his tour manager, ‘I’m going to marry that girl.’”

Even though the two didn’t speak the same language—she is German-born and and he Brazilian—they were engaged within three days, and she was living with him in Salvadore de Bahia, Brazil within a month.

She shrugged when I expressed surprise and said, “I’m very open, and when he was so sure…I figured it must have meant something.”

It is with this same openness and bravery that Dee Dee engages with materials of all varieties for her unique “upcycled” clothing, wall hangings, necklaces and incredible one-of-a-kind “fiber arts” that she creates in her studio in the MadArts building on 18th St. in Brooklyn. Her dance training and musical background (she was part of the popular German girl band, The Funky Diamonds) seems woven into the fabric of her art. There is movement in her work, rhythm and energy that one can feel, easily.

She attributes much of her creativity to growing up in a little town in the South of Germany, Restatt, where she said, “I had to do something because there is nothing there!”

Her grandmother taught her to embroider and crochet and, more than that, she said, “having lived through war, she taught me that everything is so precious that you have to use it.”

It is that lesson of repurposing that inspires Dee Dee to make harem pants out of an old Indian curtain, or to use t-shirt and jean remnants to weave within her art. She finds sticks on beaches or in junk shops around New York.

“‘Start where you are, do what you can, use what you have...’ that's my mantra,” she told me.

Dee Dee is using everything she finds, and her incredibly creative spirit to do what she can to inspire and build community in her South Slope neighborhood, putting together events like the Spring Art Exhibition at Industry City for her children’s school, where I met her, and running workshops that gather people together to be creative.

“Right now, we need healing arts,” she said. She sees the Trump win and all the uproar surrounding it as something positive and necessary.

“Something big had to happen to wake us up and bring us all together,” she said.

Through her art itself, and her community-building efforts, Dee Dee hopes to inspire people to find their talents and share them. She looks out past me dreamily toward the windows onto 7th Avenue.

“I wish we could go back to how it used to be, how indigenous people just traded based on their talents…”

Dee Dee gets it, what needs to happen in the world. I immediately hired her to help me create protective “God’s Eyes” with the children in my Art of Mindful Expression class at PS81 in Bed-Stuy. The kids loved it!

InspireCorps has also commissioned Dee Dee to help build a schoolwide collaborative “Yarn Tunnel” for PS81's presentation to potential parents and students June 3. And we had a lovely InspireCorps Presents... “Yarn Arts” night at my house May 16th. The result of that awesome effort (pictured here) will be donated to the PS81 community.