Blessed Are The Piece Makers

Blessed Are The Piece Makers is a score and prayer for activating gratitude for the aesthetic contributions and devotion of generations of anonymous female quilt makers, moms, grandmothers, aunts, whose creative labor has been mostly unrecognized outside of their families.

When I was ten years old I spent a week at a farm in South Hill Virginia with Florence Thomas, and her sister Helen. They were widowed sisters, and the mother and aunt of my dad’s co-worker and friend, Hiram Petty Thomas or PT as he was called. Helen lived in the newer brick house and Florence lived in the older clapboard farmhouse out back, near the chicken coop. When I wasn’t looking for eggs or picking cattails or exploring the tobacco barns, I was sitting at the dinning room table in the brick house chain piecing pre-cut calico squares, on an old Singer featherweight. Helen and Florence always had “piece work” at hand to sew on, whenever there was an idle minute to spare. Many quilt makers today, in lieu of “a room of their own,” can be found piecing on their dining room or kitchen tables.

The material of the prayer, the precut patchwork shapes, hold an unknown story. They came to me in the chaos of the Public Disposal and Recycle Area during a 2016 artist residency at Recology, the San Francisco dump. Who meticulously cut these pieces? Most likely it was a woman, but beyond that I am sure of little else. What was her creative vision for so many colorful squares, rectangles, triangles and diamonds? Did the colors have any special significance? Who was she making this for? When and how long did she create? Why was it left unfinished before it was ever even started? How did she live? How do so many unseen and unpaid women who have spent a lifetime of devoted labor live?

The restorative act of chain piecing the patches of this unknown, but in all probability female maker is an intercessory prayer to cultural deities who may be uneducated or willfully blind to the creative contributions of women including the trajectory of art forms developed and practiced primarily by generations of women worldwide.

Even more so, as this intercession emerges – as pieces become flags, are raised, lowered, and transformed through hours of attention, into a quilt – it is offered up to the greater deities of imagination and loving care, who bless and inhabit the humble and magnificent creations of women’s hearts and hands.

This prayer is a public memorial. I am currently looking for a venue to complete this performance and intercessory prayer over the course of two weeks. I would be in the space working from 4 to 6 hours a day. A second machine would be set up to invite participants to chain piece and enter the meditation with me.