This summer, the library is celebrating the art of making with Community & Craftivism, an exhibit showcasing how art can become an opportunity to build community and advocate for change, one stitch at a time.
From June 12 to July 23, this exhibit will display community-driven quilts, art projects created through craftivism and more, all curated by the library in partnership with artist and activist Shannon Downey. An opening event celebration will also take place on the library’s first floor on June 12 from 6:30-8:30 p.m.
The centerpiece of the exhibit is the unveiling of the library's Pride Community Quilt, which began in June 2024 when members of the Arlington Heights community created squares for the quilt. More than 50 squares were decorated, and the completed quilt will now be on display as part of this exhibit.
Downey, having previously worked with the Chicago Modern Quilt Guild, fostered a connection with quilters Maggie Hendricks and Heather Kinion who assembled the Pride Community Quilt.
“I hope that people really do get a chance to look at all the work that has been done on the individual squares because I was truly having my breath taken away,” Hendricks said. “They were so beautiful and thoughtful and truly evoked a lot, both LGBTQ+ pride, and also pride in Arlington Heights.”
“I like seeing that kind of pride in the community,” she continued. “I hope other people do too [and] see how community was created just by people decorating squares.”
The library’s Pride Community Quilt was inspired by the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which is considered to be the largest community arts project in history. The AIDS Memorial Quilt remembers the lives of those lost to HIV/AIDS.
It was conceived in 1985 by artist Cleve Jones who created the quilt’s first panel in memory of his friend Marvin Feldman. What started as one panel soon grew into a quilt comprised of 1,920 squares and in 1987, it was publicly displayed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. At the time it covered a space larger than a football field.
Today, it is made up of around 50,000 panels dedicated to more than 110,000 people, weighing an estimated 54 tons. A piece of the AIDS Memorial Quilt will be on display as part of the Community & Craftivism exhibit at the library.
Rita’s Quilt, another art piece that will be on display, started in 2019, when Downey was at an estate sale in Mt. Prospect and discovered a box filled with unfinished quilt embroidery projects. It belonged to Rita Smith who passed away at 99 before she could finish assembling her quilt.
Downey, who’s developed an online following as Badass Cross Stitch, shared her discovery on Instagram to see if any of her followers would want to piece together what would soon become Rita’s Quilt. Within 24 hours more than 1,000 people had expressed interest, and portions of the quilt were mailed to 100 artists.
“It really fired me up to keep doing this work because it’s amazing how community can be built around the simplest thing,” Downey said. “It really did just reaffirm for me what I knew, which is that art can be such an incredible mechanism for community organizing, community building.”
Once the pieces were returned to Downey, 30 local Chicagoan quilters helped assemble Rita’s Quilt. When completed, the quilt began traveling across the U.S.
“I would pop it up everywhere that I could so folks who had worked on it could show it off in their communities,” Downey said. To date, Rita’s Quilt has traveled to 40 states.
Other elements of the exhibit include sewn blankets from the Welcome Blanket Project, which are created for new immigrants who come to the U.S., a Freedom Quilt from Palatine Library, which was created by neighbors in Palatine to celebrate Black History Month, and traveling for the first time to Illinois, and the Let Freedom Read dress, created in 2023 by Rachel Jane Wittmann and Kirby Gene Anderson to celebrate the American Library Association’s Banned Book Week.
Altogether, the pieces displayed not only showcase how art can form community, but also how it can be an impactful way to shed light on important issues.
“There’s a million ways to make change, anybody can participate in change making in any way that they feel comfortable with,” Downey said. “I want people to walk away feeling inspired and ready to take action.”
Learn more at ahml.info/pride.