Art Form: African American quilting
Location(s): Metro Detroit (Wayne County)
Great Lakes African American Quilters' Network
The Great Lakes African American Quilters Network (GLAAQN) is a group of 100+ quilters who meet bi-monthly at the Civic Park Senior Center in Livonia, MI. The group was founded in 2003 by a small group of African American quilters, including Wanda Nash, Marian Coakley, Kaye Wittington, and Justine Burnell, who shared ideas and dreams of having a network of African American quilters from the Great Lakes region. The GLAAQN supports their local communities using invaluable folk art traditions of quilting within the African American experience to facilitate regular meetings, quilt donations, and various quilt related events. The organization grounds their events and programming in their founding purposes, which include: 1) acting as an information network for other African American fiber artists and artists of color; 2) providing quilts to those in need; 3) educating, documenting, and preserving the legacy of African American quilting traditions in the form of design, pattern, technique and history; 4) providing a forum for cooperative endeavors among all quilt guilds in the Great Lakes Region; 5) fostering education through the cooperative sharing of speakers, teachers and programs, displays and conferences; and 6) informing quilt guilds and individual quilters of the resources available to them. The group is largely composed of African American women. Many of these members are elders who make an intentional effort to pass on their embodied and cultural knowledge, including the African American folk art traditions of quiltmaking, sewing, and storytelling.
The GLAAQN has a longstanding commitment to donating quilts to individuals in need and has a sub-group that provides leadership for this activity. Approximately 75-100 quilts per year have been donated to hospitals and other charitable organizations. They’ve donated quilts to Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, CS Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, and John D. Dingell Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Detroit. During the recent onset of the war in Ukraine, the group sent 100 quilts to individuals directly affected by the violence. The group currently provides quilts to women veterans and their children as well as residents of the Vista Maria Residential Facility in Detroit. Additionally, the group facilitates workshops and Quilt-a-Thons to support the quilting community and their designated charities.
One of the driving purposes of the group is to foster education through their events and programming which provide valuable learning opportunities for local residents and virtual audiences. Moreover, the organization has an explicit goal of providing a forum for cooperative endeavors among all quilt guilds in the Great Lakes region. Commitment to this goal allows for many community initiatives to be shared among a large group of experienced quilters who have their own networks of people and resources. For example, many quilters in the group are members of churches in their local communities, and lead quilt circles with their fellow church members. The quilt circles GLAAQN members conduct with church members are intimate spaces which provide opportunities for the embodiment and sustaining of rich and varied folk traditions within the African American community. The GLAAQN further contributed to the documented legacy of Black quiltmakers by publishing Everlasting Threads: Honoring Heritage and History (GLAAQN, 2017), which features biographic information about the group, as well as stories, pictures, and related demographic information about the included quiltmakers and their quilts. The publishing of this text is evidence of the group’s commitment to writing and sharing local Black women’s history.
The group forwards innovation and development of skill in the art of quilting. This is evidenced by the Project Runway experiences at each bi-monthly meeting, where attendees are invited to showcase their recent artwork and creative projects, as well as within larger exhibitions held in the community. Sharing spaces hosted by the group allow attendees to view a variety of quilting techniques, hear stories from the quiltmakers, and ask technical questions related to the process–all of which are valuable experiences for honoring and disseminating the unique traditions of quiltmaking in the African American community and the Great Lakes region as a whole. The quilt collective is also well known for their annual presence at the Michigan State Fair and the African World Festival in Detroit. During these events, members from the organization are able to share their quilts, stories, and quilt techniques with broad audiences in the community and solicit new members from the group. The GLAAQN’s rich programming and presence at these large scale gatherings are evidence of their expanding presence and impact in the community–locally, nationally, and even internationally.
- Drs. Liv Furman and Marsha MacDowell, 2024
