We had a great Halloween here at common art and Boston Warm. We were fortunate that Halloween fell on Friday this year, which meant that we got to have a Halloween party of sorts during Boston Warm! We watched “Nightmare before Christmas”, played some board games, and ate some candy, cookies, and popcorn!
Last week was the first week of a quilting community project, which I am co-facilitating with Tali, the artist-in-residence at common art. Having been used in community-based art therapy for decades, quilting had been a source of collective learning and storytelling for centuries before that. In 1987, Cleve Jones’ AIDs quilt and NAMES project was one of the first community-based art-therapy interventions.
Another notable use of quilting in a community-art setting is the untitled (Homicide) community quilt facilitated by Rachel Wallis and Thelma Uranga in 2014. This quilt depicts a geographic map of Chicago with the names of those killed at the hands of the police stitched over it. The finished quilt serves as an exploration of how police violence is connected to the geographic segregation of Chicago by race and class. The process of embroidering these names helped community members build a cultural memory (one shared outside the avenues of historical discourse) and memorialize the killed members of their community.
Over the next several Wednesdays, we will have a table dedicated to our own community quilting project. In response to the prompt “What makes you you?” members are invited to make a quilt square that explores their identity. Tali and I will then sew together these non-representational self-portraits to create a large quilt. It will then be displayed somewhere in space during program time, possibly being used as the altar tablecloth during morning-meeting and Bible-study times.
My hope is that the quilt would represent how individual members make up our community. Since we each bring our unique personalities and gifts that are cherished and needed in the community, we support and belong to each other. We would be sewn together in this quilt and in the community! As time goes on and life happens, I hope the quilt would serve to memorialize these members, so they may always be remembered as a part of this community.
– Alex Shoemaker