I added a new quilt to the Victims Quilt Project. The entire series is about to hang at the Francesca Anderson Fine Art Gallery in Lexington, MA. It will be on display from February 19th to March 28th with an Opening Reception on February 29th and a Gallery Talk on March 14th. Francesca saw the project at the Arlington Center for the Arts and was so moved by it that she wanted to hang the show in her gallery, even though her gallery focuses on beautiful fine art paintings and portraits normally. During our early conversation about the exhibit, she suggested that a map might be useful and I immediately thought, “Oh, I could make that a quilt!” and so I have.
To create the map, I searched for an old map that was copyright-free but new enough to have the states in the continental U.S. I also wanted something that looked like a vintage map. I was really looking for an old classroom map like the ones I grew up with, but the one that I found is significantly older than me. I found a map of the U.S. from 1895 at the New York Public Library and then had it printed on a yard of fabric at Spoonflower. I backed it with my artist statement for the project, which I had printed in October for the Rising Star Quilters show, and then started quilting the boundary lines of the states. (It was at that point that I realized Oklahoma was still a territory so I gave it its current borders.) I then made 16 red hearts, sized to indicate the number of victims of each shooting, and appliqued them to their spots on the map. Finally, the map got a frame and a label.
Come see it hanging with the 16 Victims Quilts, “In Our Sights” and “Bullet Holes” starting February 19th.
