Quilting, Covid, and Community
Quilting, Covid, and Community
Maya Freelon’s energy is infectious. When I saw her video asking for people to join her making a collaborative tissue quilt, I signed myself up. CAM Raleigh, where Freelon’s exhibition Greater Than Or Equal To opens in September 2020, generously offered Chapman students and Escalette friends free art kits so they could to contribute to the project. During a summer of curtailed travel, cancelled plans and isolation, it was a welcome opportunity to connect.My art kit arrived in a padded manila envelope: pristine sheets of pink, red, turquoise and sunshine- yellow tissue paper, and glue sticks. I set it aside for the weekend, along with the colonies of Amazon packages this pandemic seems to breed. But when Saturday came around, my manila envelope was missing. Not unexpectedly, no member of my family claimed any knowledge of an art kit, so I did what any parent of teenage children whose chores include clean-up would do: dumpster-dived through the recycling. And there, tossed between the milk cartons (not flattened) and the college admissions mail (unopened) was my art kit.
Its rescue seemed a timely metaphor for quilting itself—retrieving what others throw away and making something both beautiful and useful. Quilters have been doing this for centuries. From the austere geometries of Amish quilts, to splashy Victorian crazy quilts pieced together with feather stitch, quilters have been making textiles from saved scraps of fabric, in patterns handed down over generations, and drawing on finely tuned instincts for color and rhythm.
African American women have unique quilting traditions that arose from the experience of slavery, when quilting was a means of survival, a provision of warmth and care for enslaved families with few resources. “We know how to make a way out of no way," said Maya Freelon’s grandmother, reflecting on a long past of resistance. Some of the best known African American quilts come from the small rural community of Boykin, Alabama—better known as Gee’s Bend. In this hamlet not far south of Selma, nestled in a loop of the Alabama River, women have been quilting for generations, through the eras of slavery, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement when some of them were put in jail, up to the present; in 2003 fifty local quilters founded the Gee's Bend Quilters Collective to market and sell their work. Gee’s Bend quilts are improvised riffs on the tradition of quilting, full of eye-popping bursts of color and wild syncopation.
These quilts were always political; they always insisted on a space for their creators. It’s unsurprising, then, that young black artists have explored quilting as activism. In the hands of an artist like Stephen Towns, quilting packs political clout. His first quilt, provocatively titled Birth of a Nation, depicts a black woman in a soiled dress nursing a white infant in front of a 13-star American flag. Initially a painter, Towns discovered that quilting was a more effective means of insurgency: “Quilting was the only way to get it done because it’s an old tradition; it’s a tradition that African Americans have used for many years; it’s a way of preserving memory through fabric.” For Birth of a Nation he’d hoped to use a real flag but couldn’t afford one. “If I don’t have anything, I’ll find a way to make it,” he says, echoing Maya Freelon’s beloved Granny Franny.
I, too, have made quilts. I’ve stitched together hundreds of tiny fabric hexagons each basted to their papers. When I look at those quilts, I remember the clothes I wore as a child, and I can touch material given to me as gifts from friends who are no longer living. I know that a quilt is a way to bind myself close to family and community.
So I was excited to piece together part of a tissue quilt, and happy to think it would end up in Raleigh, NC, one tiny part of an assemblage created by a hundred strangers, now bound together. The instructions seemed simple: rip the tissue, glue the edges, assemble. But I discovered that if tissue paper were an animal, it would be an unbroken foal. Tissue paper is frisky and skittish; it shies away from a glue stick. The slightest breeze, and it bolts from under your hands. The only solution was to let it have its head, to let it be itself, to let it—and me—relax.
When it was done, I packed it in an envelope addressed to CAM Raleigh and bid it on its way. But as Granny Franny would say, “Every goodbye ain't gone.”
Dr. Lindsay Shen
Director, Escalette Collection of Art