Is the American Quilt Falling Apart?
I begin to sketch out a New Year's card for 2024
It’s early November and Election season 2023 is over, with spirit-lifting success!
A fresh, warm wind at our backs makes it easy to turn our attention to the coming weeks. For example, I’ve wondered what hopeful holiday message we can mail to our friends and family after such a turbulent year. This might be on your mind, too.
I began by looking for designs that other people have chosen to mail out at year’s end, during other stressful times in our history. The one below is a hand-colored print by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, a Japanese-born American artist. He sent it to the painter Reginald Marsh in 1932 during the Depression.
In 1920, J. R. R. Tolkien mailed the holiday card below to his young son John. A handwritten message inside said the sender was
just off now for Oxford with my bundle of toys — some for you. Hope I shall arrive in time: the snow is very thick at the North Pole tonight.
It’s not quite the same when I think about designing our card, because it won’t be for one person, or even about us. As we enter 2024, I want it to be about our common experience as Americans — a response to the far right’s deadly threat to our democratic form of government, to our courts, and to our voting, civil, and human rights.
Traditionally, a New Year’s greeting is about hope and resolve, which fits with the message I want to send. But democracy is not a traditional subject, so the words and images that I choose will have to work very hard.
To get started, I listed the qualities I want our card to express:
unity,
participation,
the American tradition of opportunity for all,
and a fighting spirit.
The most visual of these is “the American tradition”.
I grew up in Pennsylvania Dutch country, where my dad painted designs on furniture and on things like wooden boxes for his antique shop. So quilt patterns have always been familiar to me. I like thinking that a woman’s quilting bee was a creative break from chores, and perhaps from loneliness.
I know now that quilts were sewn for many reasons in our country’s history. The Bible story about the flood is pictured in the quilt below in the bottom row, second from the right. It shows
two of every kind of animal ... camels, elephants, ‘gheraffs,’ lions, etc.
More recently, a Texas newspaper covered their local Pleasant Hill Quilting Group’s presentation, “Underground Railroad Quilt Code”. One of the speakers
told the story of Harriet Tubman, who was born into slavery in Maryland around 1820 and escaped to freedom in the North in 1849 to become the most famous ‘conductor’ on the Underground Railroad.
American politics is another subject for quilt makers. The “Crazy Quilt” from Ohio, below, is a historical record in fabric.
A "crazy quilt" has a chaotic style without repeating features. This one [below] by an unidentified 19th-century artist incorporates politicians' campaign banner portraits.
I thought about how an American quilt is made of traditional blocks such as the Friendship Star and the Bachelor’s Puzzle, whose names still tell their stories. There’s a bigger story, too. Women often took their finished blocks to a quilting bee, and together they made one whole quilt that would comfort a family for more than one generation.
Looking at the quilts above, I realize that they fulfill the qualities I was looking for, for our New Year’s greeting card: unity, participation, American tradition, and a fighting spirit.
These usually anonymous fabric artists are inspiring. I imagine them stitching together all the different things life sent their way, no matter what was going on around them — or perhaps because of what was going on.
So, I’ve completed the first step of my project. My idea has found its form. Our New Year’s greeting for 2024 will be a celebration of cooperation, of coming together in a generous, creative spirit, where each individual has an equal place in the whole.
To fit the form of a card, it should be a large quilt made of paper, where everyone receives a traditional patterned block. Together, the whole quilt will symbolize a larger, stronger hope for the New Year’s wish that I believe most of us in America share — a wish for the patient, active respect for equal human rights that will make possible a long-overdue healing for our planet.
It’s ambitious.
But I’m interested in the challenge. I know that democracy is right for us and for the planet. Our healthy, traditional American two-party system creates the space for each person’s difference in a harmonious whole.
Will it happen?
Both your "quilted" greeting and your vision for our nation's future are goals that I have no doubt can be beautifully (perhaps not entirely easily) achieved. :)
A beautiful idea, Deda, and I love that it's based on quilts - a traditional American art form. Thank you!