“Singing Everything” is the title of a poem written by the current US Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. The poem is a mediation on remembering our connectedness to land, death, horizons, birth, love, and heartbreak. It’s a meditation on remembering to remember. This particular body of work started with a collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art and the exhibition Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950-2019. The project started with the Whitney department reaching out to the communities asking, “What do you want to sing a song for in this moment?”
Participants were encouraged to write answers and send it back to us as a photo. In my studio, we worked to translate the hand of each participant across over a hundred panels of reclaimed wool blankets. The pandemic disrupted multiple attempts to host sewing circles at the museum, but eventually it happened in March of 2022. It was the first in-person program at the Museum since lockdown and drew 300+ participants over the course of several days.
If the handwritten word is an extension of one’s body and the cadence of one’s voice, then all the intergenerational hands embroidering these panels amplify the intention. As witness to the conversations and thoughts that spring forward when we gather together, the blankets are transformed into a record of energy and experience. I’m interested in sewing circles as collective meditations, a recognition of what is universal, a chorus of song.
