On display in our 2nd floor Literary Commons Gallery, through March 30:
Community Quilt: “The Sun Will Find Us”
from artist Jennifer Bastian:
The community in our physical vicinity is the community we have to rely on to keep each other safe, to make change, and lean on in a crisis. How do we connect to them more at a time when we are increasingly isolated from each other?
While artist-in-residence at a small studio in the Darbo-Worthington neighborhood of Madison, Wisconsin, I worked with community members to create and install 13 patchworked banners. Each banner has an independent line of text, and together the text makes up a more whole piece of writing, all with the goal of connection. It is my hope that within these words, we can expand our own capacity for care, togetherness and justice.
It took a few months to make these banners. During sewing bees, discussions of grief, inequity and LOVE bubbled up while our hands kept busy. We slowly secured cotton letters to soft, worn bed sheets. A couple people took squares of sheets home, spreading the work out into private spaces around the city. One helper added extra squares from her stash when she noticed I had miscounted for a couple rows, choosing fabric that perfectly complemented the color palette.
A dear friend took banners with letters pinned on to another art space and it passed through several hands before being completed by another artist while watching a quilter speak at our Central library. The same friend took another banner to a soccer game with family and taught her young nieces to sew. I took banners on multiple trips to Atlanta to care for a friend, sewing quietly as she rested, meditating on my hopes for her recovery with every stitch. I also helped to host a memorial gathering for an artist that recently died, and nearly 30 people helped sew letters on that evening, including the artists' partner and father.
This work could not have been completed without community.
We are nothing without each other.