California Story Fund
Los Hilos de la Vida: The Threads of Life
Anderson Valley Unified School District
Boonville
Project Director: Molly Johnson-Martinez
Mexican American women make quilts based on their stories
This program is a continuation of one involving Mexican immigrant women in Anderson Valley, a grape-growing and ranching region in Mendocino County, who make quilts based on their own stories and exhibit and sell the quilts up along the California coast.
Project Director Molly Johnson-Martinez, a teacher in a family literacy program, began the program in 2005 for women who needed income but had to stay home with their children. She teamed up with quilters to teach the women, not previously considered artists of writers, to make narrative quilts. The women learned to design a story quilt, use a sewing machine, use a computer to write their stories, hang a show of their quilts, talk about their quilts with the public, and learn about potential marketplaces and how to reach them.
The ongoing class now meets weekly for over three hours. The quilts depict the women’s experiences of coming to the United States and show aspects of their lives today.
With this grant, the program will hire humanities expert Alicia Rouverol to work with the women to strengthen their writing and storytelling skills. The grant will also enable the publication of a book of photographs of the quilts and stories and the editing of a film about the project.
The quilts and stories will be presented to the public in fall 2007.
The quilts and stories from a previous exhibit at the Mendocino College Art Gallery were used as material for a humanities course and art classes by several professors at the college. “The curator of the show said that the exhibit brought more classes into the gallery to discuss the work and garnered more interest from the professors and the community at large than any other art exhibit ever held at the college gallery,” Johnson-Martinez said.