Announcing Our Bodies Our Quilt
Our Bodies Our Quilt is a national, multi-generational community quilt project that invites people to reflect on their bodily autonomy, their health journeys, and their relationships to Our Bodies Ourselves (OBOS). The project hopes to engage survivors in meaningful expression and collective storytelling outside traditional clinical or policy spaces.
What does survivorship of violence mean to you?
We welcome your individual quilt squares along with an optional written reflection. You may make and send your own square, or simply design it; OBOS will use donated materials to create physical quilt squares from drawings that are submitted digitally. There's a how-to guide below with more details!
The project includes multiple opportunities to share your quilt square and your story such as:
- A hand-assembled quilt using community-donated materials and labor
- A large-scale in-person community quilting event
- A public exhibit of the finished quilt
- A digital quilt gallery on the Our Bodies Ourselves website
Our Bodies Our Quilt expands OBOS’s work on gender-based violence, while reclaiming craft as a tool for memory, resistance, and care. This pilot will demonstrate the potential for low-barrier, high-impact arts-based programming in GBV prevention and survivor engagement.
Submission Guidelines
Please submit your quilt square by January 5th.
Reflection Prompt: What does survivorship of violence mean to you?
Your quilt square can reflect a personal experience, political feeling, generational story, or a tribute to the role of Our Bodies Ourselves in your journey.
Violence based on gender can look many different ways. It includes things like these, but is not limited to them:
- Being hurt by a partner or family member
- Being pressured or forced into sex
- Being touched without consent
- Being abused as a child
- Being hurt because of your gender or sexuality
- Being forced to carry a pregnancy
- Being hurt by people in power (supervisors, colleagues, police, doctors, or teachers)
- Being harassed on the street (through a derogatory or unwelcome comment, whistle, kissing sound)
- Being emotionally manipulated, berated, or psychologically abused
Sometimes this violence happens more than once. Sometimes it runs in families. Sometimes we see it happen to people we love. And sometimes, people we love die from it.
Survivorship can mean remembering, feeling, struggling, growing, or simply existing. You get to define it.
How do I participate?
Our Instruction Guide explains everything you'll need to know to share your design, physical quilt square, and optional written reflection!
Please email [email protected] with any questions.
Quilting History & Craftivism
Quilting has long served as both a practical art and a radical form of resistance, especially for women, LGBTQ+ people, and communities whose voices have been systemically erased.
Fabric is not neutral. It has an intimate connection to the body because we use fabric to clothe, bind, swaddle, conceal, reveal, and protect. In this way, fabric mirrors the conditions of flesh. Quilting becomes a method of honoring that tension between decay and preservation, individual and collective, ephemerality and endurance.
Historically, quilting holds deep significance in Indigenous traditions, particularly among Lakota, Dakota, and Ojibwe communities. In the wake of colonial disruption, quiltmaking emerged as a practice of cultural survival.
The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt (1987-present) transformed personal grief into a national protest, memorializing those lost to the epidemic while demanding visibility and policy change. Similarly, The Monument Quilt (2013–2019), created by FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, assembled over 3,000 red squares with survivors’ stories of sexual and intimate partner violence. Displayed across public spaces, it made survivor testimony unavoidable and affirmed that healing deserves space, both literal and political.
The Our Bodies Our Quilt project invites people to take part in that same lineage of expression, continuing the work Our Bodies Ourselves has always done: making space to name what happens to our bodies, what we feel, and how we relate to the world around us. This quilt becomes a way to document and to defy. Sewn together, we preserve not only individual experience, but our shared metaphysical conditions. The feminist artist and writer Betsy Greer coined the term “craftivism” to describe this practice. As Greer writes:
Craftivism is a way of looking at life where voicing opinions through creativity makes your voice stronger, your compassion deeper & your quest for justice more infinite.
In creating this quilt we honor the bodies whose voices, although stifled, speak through thread, through memory, through tough skin.
Community Quilting Event
Join us on Saturday, November 15th from 1-4pm at the Brookline Public Library in Coolidge Corner (Brookline, MA) for a day of craftivism!