BRATTLEBORO-“Fractured, Not Broken,” a quilt made inside Springfield, Vermont’s Southern State Correctional Facility (SSCF) and stitched by more than 100 community members throughout Windham County, is on exhibit at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center through the end of this month.
The community quilt, according to a media release, was designed, pieced, and painted by incarcerated participants in a quilting workshop at SSCF to explore themes of “transformation, redemption, resilience, and community connection.”
With support of the Vermont Council for the Arts, the project was a partnership between the Vermont Prison Research and Innovation Network (PRIN) and Interaction, a local nonprofit that provides restorative justice programs, youth services, and mental health support in Windham County.
Conceived by Marie-Pierre Py, re-entry/CoSA (Circles of Support and Accountability) coordinator at Interaction, the intent behind creating “Fractured, Not Broken” was “to create dialogue and build connections between people inside and outside prison walls.”
The idea first sparked when Py was working with a colleague, Mel Dawson, facilitating restorative justice circles at the prison.
“We realized that some men were interested in joining the circles but feeling a little hesitant to do so,” Py said.
Acknowledging the vulnerability required “to join a circle like that and to speak about personal things in a prison environment,” she said that she and Dawson “wanted to create opportunities to build, so Mel started a music circle, and I wanted to start a quilt project.”
Py mentioned the quilt project to PRIN’s Abby Crocker, director of the University of Vermont Justice Research Center, whom she described as a master community builder who had been working at the prison as well, primarily doing research.
“Abby immediately recognized it as a great community building opportunity, both for the men inside to build relationships with each other, and for them to build relationships with us as facilitators of restorative justice,” she said.
Crocker’s response: “Poom! Yes, that’s it; that’s the thing.”
Twelve inmates were involved in the creation of the quilt, six of whom created individual quilt blocks.
Py acknowledged “concern on the part of the prison because the project involved sharps — scissors, rotary cutters, needles. Because it was the first time the prison was doing a project like this, they wanted to be quite careful.”
Thus, they selected inmates with a good disciplinary track record, says Py.
She noted that the prison’s volunteer coordinator, Anthony Giordano, “was really conscious of the need that folks who are incarcerated for a long time have to be involved in meaningful projects and to have access to art-making as a form of processing emotion and building community.”
Py said that some of the inmates were unsure of embarking on a foray into quilting. But there are so few creative outlets that inmates who wanted to make art were willing to give it a try.
“And then they fell in love with it,” she said.
Thoughts from the makers
The contributors reflected on the experience in artists’ statements that accompany the exhibit at the museum and online:
• “I was drawn to fabric with images of liquor bottles because I was drawn to the colors and because drinking and partying had so much to do with my past behavior and how I ended up in prison. I stopped drinking after I saw the negative things I was capable of when I was drunk.”
• “I painted a phoenix, breaking free from captivity and emerging in full glory. This is my hope for all of us. Burning feathers from the phoenix disperse throughout the quilt, uniting all of our pieces in the shared dream of transformation and freedom.”
• “At first, I felt a bit stressed quilting because I needed everything to be so perfect. Then I learned to relax and see the beauty in the imperfections. At the center of my piece is a white half octagon, which symbolizes the greatest joy of my life when my son was born, and a black half octagon, which symbolizes the biggest grief of my life when I had to pull the plug on my son.”
• “From the very beginning, I knew I wanted to depict a ship coming home from a long, hard voyage. I’m ready to go home. And ready to find peace.”
The back of the quilt references PRIN Prison Climate Surveys: “bar graphs from our survey, hand-stitched by the people who are the data,” Crocker explains. “And I think that sends a really powerful message: ‘We are these numbers.’”
Saying it with flowers, music
Another component of the quilt is several pieces of cyanotype work, created in a few workshops with inmates with Putney photographer Evie Lovett.
Py recalls that Lovett arrived with “buckets and buckets of flowers and leaves and branches.” One participant reflected: “many of us had not touched flowers or leaves in years — for one of us, it had been 16 years, with many more years to go.”
“We did cyanotypes on paper,” Lovett explains, and they then collectively designed a piece [produced] on a huge piece of fabric that would become the backing for the quilt. Other pieces unite individual sections of the quilt’s front.
“We exposed the fabric to the sun’s light in the bullpen,” a participant recalls, “and used quilt clips to hang the cyanotypes on the prison fence to dry in the sun.”
The back also incorporated a poem by Margaret Wheatley, “Turning to One Another,” about coming together and making change as a community.
Alli Cooper-Ellis, a student participant in UVM’s PRIN, volunteered to play viola at the prison quilting workshop.
The UVM senior from West Chesterfield, New Hampshire, “came down a few times and filled the room with music [for] people who hadn’t heard live music, especially the type of music she was playing, in a long time,” Py recalls.
Moved by the experience, Cooper-Ellis, who is minoring in music, composed “Quilted Forest,” for the UVM Philharmonic. The quilt creators chose to incorporate notes from the piece into the quilt’s border.
A focus on transformation
Inmates were asked to focus on the experience of incarceration in some way by agreeing on a theme to guide the process and content. They ultimately chose the theme of transformation.
Py said that “maybe three or four months into working on the quilt, it became apparent that it was going to be beautiful and powerful.”
Originally, she continued, organizers “planned to just have the men do the patchwork, and then we would machine quilt on the outside.”
“Once it became clear that this piece of art was so powerful, it became clear we needed to involve the public in some way deeper than just viewing it at a gallery or museum,” Py said.
“I’m a quilter, I always quilt by hand, and so I proposed to the men that we bring the community [into that phase],” she said. She asked the inmates if they’d feel OK with other people putting their hands on the quilt.
“They loved the idea immediately, and then they were brainstorming all the ways that it could be really meaningful to include community member stitches,” Py said.
“One of the guys who did the two heart blocks at the top of the quilt said ‘Can people put hearts in my quilt?’ And the guy who did the block with the tree said, ‘Can people put leaves in the quilt?’ And so we invited the public to participate.”
Interaction’s Claudia Prat “is really the one who organized all of the community stitchers, and the community showed up in force,” Py said.
The quilt will eventually return to the prison where it will hang in the visiting room, she announced at an Oct. 15 project celebration at the BMAC.
“We hope it will remind our incarcerated community members that their voices matter, that they can turn to their communities and their Community Justice Centers for support in the work of transforming their lives, and that there are many of us on the outside ready to welcome them home,” Py told the audience.
“In the meantime, the quilt will continue to travel and hopefully instigate community conversation both about how we respond to crime in ways that truly serve our communities and how we better support the successful reentry of incarcerated Vermonters,” she said.
Lovett reflected that “opportunities to make art and to use one’s hands in craft has such potential for regulating nervous systems and for allowing people to process experience in a way that is nonverbal, that is really meaningful.”
“And so I really do think that art making in prison is something that we should invest in and support,” she said.
Looking ahead, Py noted that Interaction was just awarded another grant from the Vermont Arts Council to have a continuing art space at the SSCF.
“It’s going to be just painting and drawing so that we don’t exclude anybody through the use of sharps,” she said.
For more information on the project, visit interactionvt.org/quilt .
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.