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By Sean Flynt | Special to The Times
The Altamont School will display the full collection of The March Quilts nonprofit arts initiative in a public event Sunday, Oct. 18, 1-3 p.m. The quilts, created by Alabama residents, are colorful, diverse and inspiring reflections about community and the legacy of the Civil Rights Era.
Artist, educator and Altamont alumna Lillis Taylor, a 1998 graduate, organized the exhibit on the school’s Red Mountain campus. The Birmingham native studied industrial design at the University of Washington but also had a class on the Civil Rights Movement that took her deeper into that history than she had ever been.
A local exhibition introduced her to Birmingham photographer Spider Martin’s images of the movement. Another featured the celebrated quilters of Gee’s Bend. “This is from Alabama?” she thought. “How is it possible that I don’t know that?”
A section of one of The March Quilts pays homage to the Selma to Montgomery marches. (Kathryn Sesser-Dorné, The Birmingham Times)For her first job after college, Taylor designed books and toys that were manufactured abroad. At 24, she found herself in China addressing production safety concerns and realized she was on the wrong path.
“I can’t be a part of this,” she decided. “This global supply chain is too big for me. I just want to focus more on community and local and transparent and ethical.”
Taylor didn’t plan to express that as a quilter but she wanted to learn to sew when she returned to Alabama. She found the Birmingham Quilters Guild and met a new friend and partner there.
“The magical spirit of Annie Bryant pulled me in,” Taylor said.
Together, they founded Bib & Tucker Sew-Op in Woodlawn. They formalized the multigenerational, multiracial nonprofit on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the three Selma to Montgomery Marches of March, 1965, and announced their organization to the community by launching the March Quilts Project.
“Everyone has a story about a quilt,” Taylor observed, and that immediately builds connections between people. “Then we can start having deeper dialogues.”
Taylor and Bryant facilitated quilting workshops at schools, hospitals, community centers and churches as a way to promote dialogue about civil rights and gather personal textile blocks to form storytelling quilts. Children and adults in 25 sewing sessions in Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham hand-stitched 461 fabric blocks that divided perfectly into three quilts. Participants in the civil rights marches were among those creating blocks, adding an especially powerful element of personal experience and memory. The project added quilts each year under different themes, and currently has 16 quilts.
A section of one of The March Quilts that is currently on display at The Altamont School. (Kathryn Sesser-Dorné, The Birmingham Times)Taylor recognized that this distinctive Alabama art needs to reach a national audience, so she left the locally focused Bib & Tucker Sew-Op and created the separate March Quilts organization. She envisions a mobile exhibition vehicle equipped and decorated specifically for touring the quilt collection across the country.
“We’ve been in white-wall galleries before, but the beauty of these quilts is that they belong to everybody,” Taylor said.
Altamont plays a key role as the March Quilts organization pivots from making to sharing. While in residence at the school, the quilts serve students and teachers as primary sources that connect and enrich the humanities, social sciences, arts and sciences. They also complement Taylor’s pairing of her industrial design approach — one that creates a path to applied fields such as architecture and engineering — with the tactile nature of craft, which builds rigor, patience and resilience.
In addition to learning about the issues at the heart of the March Quilts, her students create soft sculptures, sew quilt blocks of their own, and develop personal fan flags with symbols and colors to represent their individual identities. It’s all handwork, and students often comment about how relaxing it is — a triumph of arts education in an era when anyone’s hands might otherwise be scrolling anxiously and consuming rather than creating.
“I want everyone who comes in here to feel like they could build something if they wanted to,” Taylor said.
The Oct. 18 event will be in Altamont’s Livingston and Hames Galleries, 4801 Altamont Rd. South, Birmingham. For more information about Altamont, go to altamontschool.org.
A panel from one of the quilts highlights Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter From Birmingham Jail. (Kathryn Sesser-Dorné, The Birmingham Times)
