Sew Me a Quilt. Tell You a Story. was a performative ‘in conversation’ that was centered around quilt making and storytelling. This was a performative conversation of two black women hand-stitching a quilt in front of a live audience.
I wanted this to be about the passing back and forth of stories rooted in the everyday signified in meaning, with the performance of sewing the quilt invoking ritual and engaging in a black matriarchal tradition. When I decided to do this performative conversation, I knew that I wanted Prof. Carol Tulloch to collaborate with me because I considered myself as part of her legacy as one of the most influential scholars of black style. Her work spoke to me and my navigations of adornment and the black body. She is, to me, the matriarch of black fashion history, and there was no one else I wanted to share this experience with. Not only did she agree to do this performance with me, she also had a quilt that she had not yet completed. She had started this quilt after her mother had passed, and knowing this, I wanted to make sure I respected her mother’s memorial symbolized into the quilt as well honoring Carol’s mother by getting as close to completing the quilt as possible during our performance.