Dana Easter’s Hyde Park apartment looks like a museum. African masks and paintings cover just about every inch of available wall space; statues and sculptures sit in corners and on small tables. Near one corner of the room is a wooden CD rack, handmade and imported from Africa, and in another there’s a magazine holder wrapped in brown leather and decorated with seashells and leather strips. At a glance it could be an African drum.
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Most of the art objects are gifts collected and imported from Africa, but a few were made by Easter herself. She’s been interested in art and clothing design since her childhood in Baltimore. Her father was a tailor, and her parents allowed her to attend classes at the Maryland Art Institute. But they didn’t think of art as a worthwhile profession, so to please them Easter obtained a degree in business from Morgan State University and worked as an insurance underwriter for several years. Eventually, though, art took over her life as well as her apartment.
Most of Easter’s clothing designs axe one of a kind, because she gets her fabric in tiny quantities from odd places. One of my favorite coats (I bought it from her) has sleeves made from curtain material that reminded Easter of the Ashanti tribe; the bodice is made from upholstery fabric that reminded her of African mud cloth. “There were only a few yards,” she explains, so there’s only one coat.
