WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — A quilt made by Upper Valley residents is heading to Washington, D.C., to be part of an art exhibition honoring the United States’ 250th anniversary.
rePlay Arts, a White River Junction-based creative reuse nonprofit organization, organized the community art project in response to a call for submissions from Women Building Peace, according to a news release. The national group, which describes itself as “cross-partisan” on its website, put out a call for art inspired by the prompt “What is your hope for America?”
rePlay Arts stepped up and asked community members to create a quilt square, Melanie Adsit, the nonprofit’s co-director, said in a phone interview last week.
“It made perfect sense,” she said.
The quilt will be included in the “Becoming America: Honoring the Past, Creating the Future” exhibition, which opens Sept. 30 in Washington, DC. The details for the exhibition, including its location, are still being finalized, and Women Building Peace will provide more information via its website, womenbuildingpeace.us, at a later date. People will also be able to view the completed works in a virtual exhibition later this fall.
Staff and volunteers created kits this spring with materials to make the squares — which are all the same size — that people could pick up and return.
“We really wanted it to be open to anybody because that’s what it’s all about here: making art accessible to everybody, people who might not have made art of a quilt before,” Adsit said.
Staff and volunteers also distributed the kits to area quilting groups and brought them to public events. The only requirement was to create an image that addressed the creator’s hope for America.
“We just kind of put it out there to see what would happen,” Adsit said.
All in all, people contributed 48 squares, including about 10 made by attendees of Zack’s Place, a Woodstock-based nonprofit organization that supports people with special needs. Some people embroidered the squares while others drew on them with markers.
“People were really excited about it,” Adsit said. “The message was a good message that people wanted to get out there.”
In late July, volunteers gathered to sew the squares together using donated denim fabric, she said. Afterward, rePlay submitted photographs of the quilt to Women Building Peace and found out in mid-August that it had been accepted into the exhibition.
After the national exhibition is over, the quilt will be displayed at rePlay. The edges were purposely left unfinished, so that more squares can be added in the future.
“People were so positive and excited about it; we wanted them to keep adding to it,” Adsit said.
