Cornell First-Year Writing Seminar, Alexandra Dalferro (instructor), Crafting Community, Ithaca, 2021

In my First Year Writing Seminar “Craft Culture: Craft, Art, and Gender in Context,” we learned about the incredible needlewomen of Gee's Bend, Alabama, and the ways race, class, and sex/gender shape recognition of skill and impact knowledge production about creative work such as quilting. We also read an essay by bell hooks, "Aesthetic Inheritances: history worked by hand," to think about how quilts can be spaces "where art and life come together" (332) as we unpacked the significance of the long history of Black female artistry materialized in objects like quilts. Students made their own quilt squares by hand and machine sewing; some had never sewed before, and others with more familiarity taught and helped their peers. For design inspiration, we looked at many examples of quilts including the excellent collection at the Johnson Museum, and the quilt top contains fabrics from the Cornell quilt project, from students' own sources, and from my stash of scraps that were piling up from mask making and other projects. Once the individual squares were finished, students wrote museum labels for them to consider the contextual transformations that occur when everyday items are put on display in museums. The finished quilt top is a celebration of collaboration, learning new skills, and the power of material things to tell stories that can challenge systems and structures of oppression.

Contributing students:

Aanya Bhandari

Noah Choe

Kaitlyn Feely

Jack Follows

Alicia Gonzalez

Ellie Ji

Bridget Gu Lee

Clarice Lim

Jennifer Muson

Bridget Neely

Thoko Nyasulu

Michael Roudik

Eliza Ryan

Elizaveta Zabelina

Nikitha Zachariah

Shea Kinander