a historical restoration & quilting project
Freelance project (sole designer), 2021.
I grew up in Montgomery, Alabama — the city where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus and Martin Luther King, Jr. preached at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. It’s a city that grapples with a dark history of injustice. Some of that history has inspired monuments like the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which highlights the failures of the past as powerful teaching tools.
The Hopewell Project is an initiative to honor enslaved peoples. At the heart of the project is a local antebellum church built by slaves in the 1840s. The church contains rare architectural evidence of a slave gallery — a partitioned area where enslaved people were permitted to worship while physically segregated from white churchgoers. With grant funding from the Alabama Historical Commission, the church is being restored as a historical site.
Sew Their Names is a sister project that asks participants to select slave names from antebellum church records and embroider those names onto quilt blocks. The intention is to honor enslaved persons whose identities had previously been forgotten. Celebrated quilt artist Yvonne Wells will eventually piece the name blocks together into a final quilt.
When I came on board, Hopewell needed quick-turn brand development before the kickoff of the Sew Their Names quilt project. I had a little less than a month to work on logos, invitations, signage, sewing instructions, and a simple website. So although the work shown here isn’t my most polished (remember what I said about timeline?), I knew I wanted it in my portfolio because of how deeply meaningful it is.
Check back soon for images!