Projects > Memorial Quilt

Remembering Our Roots

"At the center of all is Woman, and no thing is Sacred...Cooked, Ripe... without her blessing, her thinking."

from The Sacred Hoop "The Ways Of Our Grandmothers"

Grandmother of the Sun: Ritual Gynocracy In Native America-pg 12 paragraph 2.

Paula Gunn Allen

We honor Bay Area lesbians with disabilities who have joined the ancestors in the past 20 years. African American quilt-maker Karen Hampton has stitched and burned the images, names and words of a dozen of these women into a multi-layered tribute on hand-dyed fabric. Grounded in the African American story quilt tradition, Karen's use of materials and symbols reflects the diaphanous, complex lives of disabled lesbians.

We are both bold and hidden. These twelve women built community, among their friends, in the Bay Area, and throughout the US and beyond. They began and sustained resources for lesbians, feminists, people with disabilities. Active in their Native American, Jewish, Arab and African American communities, they wrote, sang and made visual art. Their political activism included membership in the Black Panthers, starting Ms. Magazine, founding the Women's Cancer Resource Center to running for City Council (and so much more)– as out dykes. Filled with difficulty and delight, their lives were too short. Brilliant, confrontational, joyful and sexy, these women were warriors and peacemakers. The memorial quilt is a manifestation of literal and symbolic ways they touch those of their many communities who carry their legacies forward. Through text and texture, material and design, the quilt reflects the endurance of love, the deepening of roots, the whisper of their voices in this re-memory.

Barbara Ruth, resident poet of Fabled Asp