Quilting for a Cause

FREE
Zoom program. RSVP Required.

Quilting for a Cause
Thursday, October 31, 2024, 12:00 pm to 12:45 pm EDT

Explore how quilts, and the quilting communities who make them, are building awareness and driving change at local, national, and international levels. Led by Julie Hollenbach, and featuring mixed media artist Carla Hemlock and Casey House Quilting Committee member Glenn Bell, this panel discussion sheds light not only on quilts as creative and cathartic outlets for makers, but on their power to build resonating narratives, and the role of cultural institutions in raising these narratives for audiences to engage with.

Speaker: 

Julie Hollenbach

Julie Hollenbach is queer, white-settler curator and cultural historian born on unceded Syilx territory, now living on unceded Mi’kmaq territory where she is an Assistant Professor of Craft History and Material Cultures teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD University). Her interdisciplinary scholarly, creative, and curatorial work engages a queer, feminist, critical-settler and critical race methodology to consider craft and material culture at the intersections of function and meaning, place and time, histories and communities, practice and tradition.

Glenn Bell

Glenn Bell has been volunteering with Casey House for over 30 years, having first joined a couple of years after the hospice opened its doors. He is usually behind the camera photographing events and fundraisers for the hospice. 

As a tween, before being able to afford his first camera, Glenn dabbled in macrame and needlepoint for a couple of summers. It was a 1970s thing. Skip twenty years to the late 1980s, and despite being a self-described "terrible sewer" he began contributing to many of the quilts at Casey House. Glenn is forever grateful for the patient tutelage of the far more skilled quilters on that committee.

One of Glenn's favourite films is How to make an American Quilt. The story is rich, the quilting storyline is inspirational, and the use of lighting is wonderful.

Carla Hemlock

Carla is a textile and mixed media artist from the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory. Her work aims to initiate conversation on historical, political, social and environmental issues. She, along with her husband received the 2017 Excellence in Iroquois Arts from the Iroquois Museum in Howes Cave NY. Her works have been exhibited in Canada, United States, France, Germany and Russia.
Her work is currently in private, corporate and public collections which include the Smithsonian American Art and Smithsonian National Museum of American Indian in Washington DC, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, the Quebec National Museum of Fine Arts and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. She lives and has her studio in Kahnawake.

This Zoom program will feature a 20-minute conversation with the speakers, followed by a live audience Q&A.  Questions may be sent in advance to programs@rom.on.ca.

Please indicate the "Conversations October 31, 2024, Q&A" in the subject line.

All registrants will be emailed a link to access the program 24 to 48 hours in advance.

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