Projects
Roland Freeman (1936 – 2023) "Catherine Gill, Classy Blaylock, Decatur, MS", 1993. color print. Gift of the Kohler Foundation, Inc., 2022.9.162.
Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South
November 16, 2024-April 13, 2025
Step into the world of quilting with Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South, on view November 16, 2024 – April 13, 2025. Featuring over 50 handmade quilts from MMA’s permanent collection, including several collected by American photographer Roland L. Freeman, this exhibition explores how Black, Southern material culture is manifested through quilts and quilters’ lived experiences.
Curator Dr. Sharbreon Plummer combines thorough research, innovative interpretation, and community engagement to form a cohesive, experiential study of American art through a Black feminist lens. In a time where interest in Black quilt traditions ebb and flow, Of Salt and Spirit asks how we champion those who have remained rooted in their purpose and significance? This show facilitates a conversation about the dynamism of the South, how we honor place and preserve the past, present and future.
Learn more here.
The People’s Quilting Bee
The People’s Quilting Bee is an emergent project developed by Drs. Sharbreon Plummer and Jess Bailey. This project honors and amplifies communally engaged quilt history as integral to quilting today while further unraveling how quilts have been tethered to a problematic Americana aesthetic. The current lecture series and online quilting circle launches Fall 2023. Guests will share their knowledge and experience of topics that are integral to how we understand quilting in the past and in our present such as through a deeper consideration of materials, diaspora, indigenous knowledge, and queering quilt legacies. Participants will leave with a renewed understanding of both the diversity and vitality of quilt histories in passing down artistic traditions.
Learn more here.
Stitch x Stitch: Conversations on Quilting, Healing + Abolition (Co-organizer + Curator)
Stitch x Stitch is a project situated within a long historical conversation between quilting and social justice. Textile artists have long engaged with quilting and community crafting practices to advocate for the abolition of criminalization and incarceration. Abolitionist quilters have used imagery and embroidered text, as a means of swaying public opinion and troubling state level policies that promote notions of “order and justice” through criminalization. Through politically charged work, artists have long highlighted the intersection of racial capitalism and trauma and the disproportionate impact of police violence, criminalization and incarceration on communities of color. We seek to explore how quilting can serve as an embodied, liberatory practice and the role it plays in facilitating new forms of liberation. We also wish to interrogate definitions of "healing," both productive and problematic, and its intersections with quilting and work of the hand.
The inaugural convening was held July 2022 along with a subsequent exhibition from through August 2022.
