This event is now FREE. Registration required.

Quilting has a rich history as a form of storytelling, protest, and remembrance across cultures and continents. The versatility and utility of quilts have made quilting an accessible and powerful tool for expressing ideas and emotions. Its enduring popularity speaks to its continued relevance in today’s world.

From women’s suffrage quilts of the 1800s to Hmong story cloths of today, quilters have used this traditionally domestic medium to record painful histories, spark mass protests, and explore identity and heritage. Activist quilts can be both starkly political and intensely personal.

For many makers, the process of making a quilt is as meaningful as the quilt itself. Creating an activist quilt can be a single person’s meditative way to sit with their feelings or an entire quilting community’s expression of solidarity and support. Quilters use their craft to explore the political in a deeply personal way to address larger political issues like gun control, political injustice, and immigrants’ rights.

Join us for a virtual presentation about the historic and contemporary role of activism in quilting on Sunday June 4th, 2023 at 2:00 pm CST.

About the speaker:

Julie Bowden is an avid quilter and a founding member of the Cambridge Modern Quilt Guild in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Particularly interested in quilts with a message, Julie created a library guide on the roots and current evolution of activist quilts and one of her quilts was included in the book Stitching Stolen Lives: The Social Justice Sewing Academy Remembrance Project. A former juvenile public defender, she is currently earning an MA/MFA in Children’s Literature with a focus on social justice.

Register here.