From afar, Alassane Koné’s portraits appear composed of coarse brush strokes: Move a little bit closer, and you would swear it’s meticulously arranged straw.

In reality, like a lot of the artworks on display at La Galerie du 19M, housed within the Paris hub for Chanel-owned specialty workshops that opened last yr, Koné’s are made with textiles.

Ditto the spooky, moss-green figures by artist Cheikha Sigil lording over the doorway of the exhibition “On the Thread: From Dakar to Paris,” which elaborates on Chanel’s cultural exchange with Senegal and affirms the gallery’s ambition to exalt weaving and embroidery on a worldwide scale.

Last December, Chanel made history as the primary European luxury brand to stage a fashion show in sub-Saharan Africa, unveiling its Métiers d’Art collection amid a three-day program of cultural events within the capital of Senegal.

The French brand invited a number of local creatives to cooperate on the event, established long-term initiatives to advertise craftsmanship and sustainable farming, and mounted 19M’s first overseas exhibition.

That display, which ran from Jan. 12 to March 31 on the Musée Théodore-Monod d’Art Africain, attracted greater than 10,000 visitors, giving unprecedented exposure to local textile artisans and generating distinguished international media coverage, including a menton in Time magazine.

The Paris exhibition, tweaked and expanded for its stint on the mothership, coincides with heightened interest in textile art and rare craft skills, in line with Bruno Pavlovsky, chairman of Chanel SAS and president of Le 19M.

“The entire Paris art world wants to return,” Pavlovsky marveled in an interview on Monday as curators put ending touches on displays and a panel discussion unfurled, moderated by French newspaper Le Monde and dedicated to traditional know-how and fashion’s role in preserving it.

The chief stressed that the exhibition, which opens to the general public Wednesday and runs through July 30, has no link to the Paris-Dakar Métiers d’Art collection, which lands in Chanel boutiques later this month. “I believe the gathering will fly by itself,” he remarked.

While the handiwork of a number of the embroidery houses that made that collection is on display, the foremost goal of the showcase is to highlight Senegal’s wealthy textile traditions, which return centuries, and its vibrant art scene, Pavlovsky said.

“Chanel has been the enabler. But Chanel just isn’t the topic of what you see here. The main focus is more concerning the techniques around threads, weaving and embroidery. It’s concerning the craft and the artistry,” he explained.

Some 30 artists are showcased within the Paris exhibition, spanning paintings, photography, sculptures, installation and design objects.

Pavlovsky said Le 19M has received an outpouring of interest from community organizations within the nineteenth arrondissement, which boasts a high concentration of Senegalese immigrants, and it plans to ask Chanel’s ready-to-wear and couture clients, journalists, educational institutions and 19M’s various industrial partners to find the showcase.

For the reason that inauguration of the 19M constructing, home to Chanel-owned specialty ateliers including Maison Lemarié, Lesage and Atelier Montex, its gallery has hosted two exhibitions and welcomed 27,000 visitors. It expects a greater influx once a streetcar provides a better public transportation link to the location near Porte d’Aubervilliers, a working-class area north of Paris.

Pavlovsky noted that visitors to the Dakar museum included about 2,500 students who could take part in workshops and be exposed to artisanship as a possible profession path. “We’re recruiting greater than 100 people per yr,” he noted.

Each exhibitions were designed to coach people, foster connections and spark artistic expressions between Senegalese and Western artisans, he explained.

Consider the pairing of French artist Julian Farade and the ladies of Ngaye Mekhe, north of Dakar, who embroider the lengths of off-white Malikane cotton women use to hold children on their backs, often known as pagnes. Farade painted the pagnes with abstract landscapes and animal figures, to which the embroiderers added geometric designs, and conjured surprising interpretations.

Touring the exhbition with a visitor, Olivia Marsaud, one among the curators, noted that a blue figure Farade painted represented a bird, nonetheless, the embroiderers spied a frog and stitched motifs of that creature as an alternative — to poetic effect.

Marsaud paused in front of works by Alioune Diouf, who portrays fashionable figures by sewing fabric scraps directly onto his canvases. Pointing to the delicately coiling decorations on the garments depicted, Marsaud noted that Diouf uses a hand-guided embroidery device often known as the Cornely, which has fallen out of favor within the West because it was invented within the mid-1800s, though Montex still possesses two of the antique tools.

One of the vital charming installations was realized by Senegalese designer Marie-Madeleine Diouf, who displays photos of her stylish family, heirloom clothes, and the tools employed to create indigo fabrics, her speciality.

Some visitors will even have the chance to assist embroider “work in progress” maps of Dakar and 19M with help from the artisans of Montex and Lesage.

“Our specialty ateliers are quite mysterious for the general public on the whole,” Pavlovsky said, noting it’s well nigh not possible to let visitors stream through its busy workrooms. “But with our gallery, we are able to create exhibitions of our savoir-faire.”

He noted that the majority of the showcases involve artists collaborating with 19M artisans, who find it very inspiring, and who’re very motivated to display their know-how, especially to young people.

“It’s good option to create a connection between inside and out of doors,” he said. “Visitors can learn, discover — and maybe find their future profession.”