Learn more about the Remembrance Project

The Social Justice Sewing Academy’s Remembrance Project started in 2020, extends the longstanding community textile artwork of the Social Justice Sewing Academy (SJSA) in an important historical moment. With in-person workshops on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a growing awareness of the far-reaching harm of systemic racial violence in the United States, the Remembrance Project provides activist art banners for public display. The project is solidarity in the form of a memorial.

Solidarity exists at the core of the textile artwork, community art workshops, youth leadership development and 21st-century sewing circles of the Social Justice Sewing Academy. In-person workshops prior to the COVID-19 pandemic offered youth participants the opportunity to highlight issues important to them by designing a quilt block that was then embroidered by an extensive network of adult embroidery volunteers. Constructed into quilts, the blocks have been displayed at dozens of quilt shows, art galleries, museums, and other public venues with the goal of lifting up youth perspectives on environmental degradation, the wage gap, racial profiling, and other social justice topics that youth chose to emphasize in their blocks. All of these quilts tour as a permanent part of the SJSA quilt collection. Over time, having received many notes from embroidery volunteers who researched and learned about youth visions for a better future, it became clear that embroidery volunteers were experiencing this project as a form of consciousness-raising and self-education. Many volunteers recounted instances in which they are bringing the embroidery work out in public (embroidery can be highly portable) instigated conversations that would not otherwise have occurred. In airports, bus stops, and dormitory common areas, embroiderers were queried about the topic of the block, the work of SJSA, and the embroidery volunteer’s own investment in the project.