hopewell Project exhibition brand 🧵🪡🖌️
Freelance, 2020-2023 | Role: Lead Designer | Photography by Jon Cook
I grew up in Montgomery, Alabama — where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat 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 failures of the past as teaching tools. The Hopewell Project exists in that reflective historical space. Hopewell needed a brand before the kickoff of a quilting project, and I worked with Judge Susan Walker to design logos, posters, signage and a simple website.
The Hopewell Project honors people who were enslaved. At the heart of the project is a local antebellum church built by slaves in the 1840s, containing rare architectural evidence of a slave gallery — a partitioned area where slaves were allowed to worship while 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, where participants selected slave names from antebellum church records and embroidered the names onto quilt blocks to honor those whose identities had been forgotten. Celebrated quilt artist Yvonne Wells pieced the names together into a final quilt.
The Hopewell logo is inspired by the “Door of No Return” in Ghana. The color palette takes inspiration from Alabama’s natural landscape, like red clay soil, sandy loam, deep green pine trees and blue skies.
Above: These retractable banners served as the exhibition text for a traveling show about the Hopewell Project and Sew Their Names. Each panel explains a different aspect of the projects.
Below: Quilt and textile imagery came into play in the campaign design elements.
Extraordinary black-and-white photography of the Mt. Willing quilters by Jon Cook.
Editable posters for the Sew Their Names quilting project. Participants in multiple locations stitched names onto fabric squares, which were then pieced into a larger quilt.