Stitching Stolen Lives: The Social Justice Sewing Academy Remembrance Project

The intersection of quilting and activism isn’t new—it stretches back almost two centuries, including to Quaker quilts with antislavery messages. Lifelong sewist Trail (Sew with Sara), who published her first sewing book at age 13, founded the Social Justice Sewing Academy (SJSA) as a means for sewists and quilters to engage directly with issues of social justice and activism. Here, we see the fruits of these artivists’ labor. SJSA coordinates two remembrance projects as a means of honoring people, predominantly people of color, who have been murdered. The SJSA Remembrance Project is reminiscent of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in that it consists of individual blocks honoring people with HIV/AIDS that are displayed to raise awareness, and the SJSA’s Memory Quilt program provides thoughtfully created quilts to grieving families as a means of honoring a loved one whose life was stolen by violence. Trail and Wong present each person’s story alongside both the memory quilt created for their family and the memorial block created for the Remembrance Project. Also highlighted are SJSA’s community quilts, designed and created by students who have participated in the organization’s workshops for young people.