I'm trying to come up with a concise, digestible answer I can give when asked that kind but dreaded phrase, "what are you working on now?". There's the simple, factual response: "I'm making a quilted cemetery." This elicits interest and, depending on the audience, either excitement or polite bemusement. Either way, there are followup questions. In the moment, I have to decide how deep to dive - and I've never been great at thinking on my feet. So, the need for an elevator pitch.
First, to define the many threads that led me into this project - a difficult task on its own. I find great meaning in the past, both in my personal history and in human history at large. Walking through a cemetery, a record of decades or centuries of human life, and then stopping to read a particular gravestone, notice its neighbors, and place the person buried there in the context of their own life, is shrinking the macrocosm of human history down to a single person's life and death. When that person is a woman, and particularly when the grave is an old one, that headstone may be the only remaining marker of her life. The only clues to be read may be her date of death - often indicating a short life - and, often, the smaller graves surrounding her, memorials to children who led even shorter lives. The first grave I quilted was a replica of a woman's headstone from the 19th century. Zebiah died at 30, a few days after the birth of her son. His memorial, towering over hers, reveals that he died in the Civil War while still a teenager. Her husband, buried beside her, outlived both his wife and son by decades. That's a small and probably common story, and only a tiny piece of the devastating epic of the Civil War, but finding those small personal stories is what makes history feel real. It's not just a story - it really happened. I chose to recreate Zebiah's grave, not those of her husband and son, even though they give important context to her life, because hers is a story less told. That she clearly died as a consequence of childbirth is a potent reminder of why it is so important to fight for the reproductive rights that are being stripped from us today. It's also a fact of women's lives throughout history; walk through any old cemetery and the graves of women tell the same story. Before any understanding of medical hygiene childbirth was often a fatal experience, and before birth control it wasn't a matter of choice. A woman's duty was to marry and procreate. When she died, in childbirth or otherwise, the identifying marker on her grave would more often than not read simply, "Mother". I don't mean to say that motherhood isn't important; most graves, after all, are laid by surviving family members, and indicate the deceased's relationship to them. But I do find it striking that these women's primary identities are also, often, the thing that killed them. I've gone down a rabbit hole. More things I love about cemeteries: To walk alone in a cemetery is to be solitary and in community at the same time. This became especially apparent to me during COVID, when we were all isolating. I'm a hermit and homebody and I expected to find isolation easy; and, in some ways, it was. I relished the lack of pressure to socialize and the absence of disapproval around staying home all day. But what I missed were general communal experiences: sitting in coffeeshops, going to movies, eating in restaurants. Being with people without needing to interact with them. In a weird way, I filled this need by going to cemeteries. The quiet continuity of a few hundred years of human life, gathered together in a beautiful green space, was calming and human. How does this all connect to quilting? A few days ago I read a piece of writing by a quilter that resonated with me. She posted a picture of a beautiful hand-sewed quilt lying on a bed. She explained that years ago, her husband built the bed, meaning for it to be a family heirloom to be passed down, and she had always wanted to make a quilt to accompany the bed. She described the act of hand-sewing the quilt, with the intention of passing it to future generations, as an act of radical hope in this moment when it feels like the world is crumbling around us. To spend so much time on something destined for future generations is to make a tangible expression of the belief that those generations will exist, that somehow we will endure. If cemeteries are a line into the past, a connection to our history, and we look at quilting as an extension into the future, then we, the creators, are placed in the center of a continuing thread. I find looking in both directions along this line comforting - back into the past, to be reminded that this has all happened before, and forward into an uncertain future, with the hope that someday another person will exist to derive the same comfort from me. The idea of an heirloom is also powerful to me, both as a maker of future heirlooms and a receiver of those from my family. I come from a long line of makers and have in my possession quilts, knitted objects, and weavings made by my mother, my grandmothers, and their forebears. I've been to museums and seen quilts made by anonymous women, enslaved women, and women whose names are only known because they signed their quilts. How many of the women in my local cemetery, buried only with the marker "mother", also left behind handiwork, the only creative outlet in what was often a hard and unfulfilled life? How often is a beautiful anonymous quilt hanging on the wall of a museum the only remnant of a woman's life beside her gravestone? And then there is the matter of being an American, and Jewish. While quilting exists throughout the world, it has a particular tradition in American culture. A lot of this is tied, inextricably, to the cotton industry and this country's history of enslavement. Quilting as a creative outlet for black Americans has created some of the most beautiful examples of the art form, from Gee's Bend through to contemporary quilters like Faith Ringold and Bisa Butler. As with much of American history, it's a fraught subject that is sometimes hard to grapple with directly as a white person - but a necessary one. (More on this later - I'm taking a quilt history class soon!) Quilting is, however, not a part of Jewish history - at least not for the Jews of Eastern Europe, from whom I am descended. Articles I've read suggest this may stem from the poverty and lack of free time amongst Jewish peasant women. This doesn't really track for me - similar issues plagued rural America in the 19th and 20th centuries, and quilting was in fact a way to address them, reusing materials over and over - but what does seem likely is that wool, not cotton, was the primary material available in Eastern Europe, and therefore weaving and knitting were the crafts generally employed. I have no idea if my European ancestors quilted, but I've read of some Jewish women who, upon immigrating to America, took up the craft as a way to assimilate into their new culture. My Jewish grandmother, a second-generation American, is a master craftswoman. This, too, ties into cemeteries. At least where I live, in New England, most cemeteries are heavily Christian, gravestones replete with crosses and bible verses. Occasionally a small corner is dedicated to the Jewish dead. Incorporating my Jewish identity into some of the quilts I make is a way of merging my American-ness with my Jewish roots. If I kept writing I would probably come up with more threads to tie into the ever-tangling knot that is my inspiration, but I'll stop now. To try to synthesize what I've said here in a few brief phrases: I'm creating a cemetery of graves, mostly women's graves, and using the medium of quilting, traditionally "women's work", because my perspective is filtered through the gaze of being a woman in the world - what it has meant historically and what it might mean in the future. When it's all too clear that we are living through a dark period in history, is it possible to look back towards the past, witnessing our mistakes and acknowledging our predecessors, and then to look forward and make something destined for the future, expressing hope and belief that our descendants will survive to look back to us? Graves are heirlooms of the past - quilts are heirlooms for the future. I'm trying to make a space that rests on the point where those two timelines meet.
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Julia Cooper
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