Quilters help Palestinians, Jews, others to
link patchworks of stories, views, hopes
Sunday, 18 February 2007
Quilt-making is among the
creative arts now flowering for the
Much has been said about quilts and their
creators:
"When life goes to pieces and
gives you scraps, make a quilt."
"Blessed are the Piecemakers."
"Blessed are the children of
the Piecemakers, for they shall inherit the
quilts!"
"Quilters make great
comforters."
"Quilters affect
eternity. They can never know where their influence stops."
"Quilts are like relationships, stitched together one
piece at a time."
IN
In 1999, the ground-breaking
By 2000, her world-class artistic creation by
hundreds of global contributors crossed its first international border to be
exhibited in
Continuing to tour North America, wherever the
quilt travels Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities come together to
organize its exhibition and forge new bonds.
When
Over 500 such success stories are preserved at http://traubman.igc.org/messages.htm
.
Next month, March 17-31, 2007,
As she travels, she will be pulling material out
her bag of fabric, and inviting the people she meets to create fabric
self-portraits.
They will include the words and images -- problems,
activities and dreams -- they would like to share with the world.
Returning home,
The completed project will be a documentary -- not
in film -- but in fabric.
Elizabeth Shefrin
says: "My experience with the Middle East Peace Quilt has shown me
that art can often reach audiences in a way that written or spoken words
cannot.
"I hope this project will bring stories of
Palestinians and Israelis to North American audiences."
IN
A new initiative has
been birthed by The Faith Quilts Project of
At first, most of
thirty-eight lead quilters attended workshops in collaborative quilt-making and
dialogue facilitation.
Then they worked with single faith communities as well
as multi-faith and inter-faith groups on fifty-seven faith quilts.
Those 57 quilts will hang permanently in churches,
mosques, temples, synagogues, and community centers in the Greater Boston area.
From that, The
It is co-sponsored by
The Dialogue Forum, The Public Conversations Project, and The Pluralism
Project.
Individuals and organizations are invited to meet and
help create squares for the collaborative quilt.
No experience is needed and interested citizens can
contact ERonald@thedialogueforum.org .
The quilt is being made as a gift for a Quaker
Meeting House in Ramallah, where Israelis and
Palestinians gather to build relationships and invent a better future.
Quilting can help us to Connect -- with our past,
present and preferred future.
With each other, even "enemies."
With a visual patchwork of memories, what is profound
for us.
Of visions of what can be.
What we can create.
Together.
Published in The Boston Globe -- 17 February 2007
QUILTERS HOPE TO LINK PATCHWORK OF VIEWS
By Rich Barlow
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/02/17/quilters_hope_to_link_patchwork_of_views/
History recalls no instance of a quilting bee
having changed the world. But might one nudge humanity, slightly, toward its
better nature?
Hoping against hope that the answer might be yes, 30
men and women hunched over tables piled with colorful fabrics in a stately room
at
"The whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict does make
me very sad," said Vinny Dorio,
a carpenter from Roslindale whose self-portrait included a tear. "Even a little thing like this, just to make this quilt [for] Ramallah, which someone sees and says, 'We have to stop
this.' You never know.'
His wife, Elizabeth Quinlan, depicted her head with
orange fabric atop it, representing fire. A spiritual symbol, the flame
represented the burning hope for peace, she said. Considered an element in
primitive times, fire also captured her own spirituality, which is in nature.
"I grew up with a lot of different faiths, and I rejected a lot of
them," she says. "And I'm still kind of searching."
The idea of resurrecting a ritual of neighborliness as
an instrument for modern-day peacemaking sprouted in the mind of divinity
student Emily Ronald last summer, when
Then she met a Palestinian Quaker visiting Harvard
during a trip to the
Ronald, who describes her own spirituality as pagan,
had worked on the Faith Quilts Project, which ran for three years until ending
last year and in which artist Clara Wainwright coaxed dozens of area residents
to make self-portraits expressing their religious or spiritual outlooks.
Describing the project to the activist, Ronald
intrigued the woman with the idea of designing a quilt for the stone wall of
the Ramallah meeting house. The quilts, representing
a coming together of different peoples, would express the longing to overcome
the human divisions at the house. Because of travel restrictions, Ronald said,
"It is very, very difficult for Israelis and Palestinians to gather in Ramallah at the meeting house."
From the self-portraits made last Sunday, Ronald will
choose the ones to make into a collage for the quilt. Then she'll ask
interested people to help her sew and put batting, the padding, in the final
product, which she hopes to finish by summer.
That the quilters talked about faith and the
Treading gingerly on the difficult Arab-Israeli
debate, the organizers of the bee nonetheless asked participants to talk with
each other about their views of the conflict and to share bits of themselves,
such as their faith, with their fellow portraitists.
A. Reyyan Bilse, a 27-year-old graduate student at Tufts, made sure
to depict the Muslim head scarf she wears in her portrait because "that's
a huge part of me." Growing up in
"When I was in high school, we went to
"Women are taking over Harvard today,"
triumphantly declared Wainwright, who participated in the quilting. She was
referring to the appointment of Drew Gilpin Faust as the university's first
female president, but she could just as easily have been noting the gender
ratio among the quilters, only a half dozen of whom were men.
Yet, as the tear on Vinny Dorio's fabric face showed, the hope for peace in the room
knew no gender division.
Questions, comments or story ideas can be sent to spiritual@globe.com.