Memories of Migration: Common Thread — Making a Community Story Quilt
“Common Thread” was a community quilting project that connected people over stories about craft, family, and immigration in Flushing, Queens, a neighborhood with a high percentage of foreign-born residents. The project was a collaboration between artist Naomi Kuo and the Queens Memory Project. It consisted of a series of workshops which took place at the Flushing Library over the Summer of 2018 where participants worked together to create a single large quilt.
Participants learned a variety of hand-sewing and quilting techniques from four local instructors and created individual quilt blocks reflecting these techniques. Attendees and instructors alike shared their families’ migration stories and discussed how sewing and other textile arts played a role in their family experiences. Many of the quilt blocks visually represent key elements in these stories. The blocks were combined and then hand-quilted by participants over a large wooden frame. Simple circuit boards, which store excerpts of the participants’ recorded stories, were sewn onto the back and connected to buttons in the quilt design that triggered audio playback.
Textile craft served as a universal starting point to draw out the specifics of different cultural and family traditions as they are preserved and/or adapted to life in contemporary Queens.
The quilt is permanently displayed at the Queens Public Library Flushing Branch. Audio clips mapped can be accessed via Youtube, and are located on the quilt in the map above.
Special thanks to the Queens Memory team: Natalie Milbrodt, Lori Wallach, and others; and the quilting instructors: Thadine Wormly, Stephen Au, Judy Chang, and Helen Griffin. The workshops were funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services as part of the Queens Public Library’s “Memories of Migration” series and by the Fan Fox Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, with generous supplies from Materials for the Arts. Additional funding was also provided by Social Practice Queens through the Action Art Grant.
Workshops at the Queens Public Library Flushing Branch - Summer 2018
Exhibitions & Events 2018-2019
Additional project documentation can be viewed at the Queens Memory Project website.