The Women’s Memorial Quilt is a tribute quilt created & dedicated to the missing & murdered women of Vancouver. The Downtown Eastside Centre for the Arts is offering workshops for community members to create and add new sections to the Quilt in time for its display during the annual Women’s Memorial March.
This program will continue the legacy begun by Diane Wood, who will teach community members the square for quilt-making technique. We offer this program as an opportunity to come together in community and make meaningful pieces to add to the Quilt in the time leading up to the Women’s Memorial March on February 14, 2009.
Join the Women’s Memorial Quilt Project to participate in honoring sisters, mothers, friends, lovers who have been lost to this terrible tragedy.
Many members of our community and those beyond it did not participate in the quilt-making sessions that resulted in the original Memorial Quilt. Since then, we have lost more women in the downtown eastside and there is a renewed expression by community members; both men and women, of their desire to contribute to the project.
The Women’s Memorial Quilt represents a form of honoring, commemoration and expressive closure.
There will be two parts to this program.
The First is the creation of the squares for the quilt with an exhibit at the Interurban for the week prior to the Women’s Memorial March 2009 and the second is the documentation of this journey. We will be documenting this project with both film & photography.
Our goal is to produce both a coffee table book and a DVD that journeys from the creation of these additions to the main Quilt up to and including the Women’s Memorial March on February 14, 2009. Consisting of interviews, interwoven with photos, these records will give a first-hand view of the Missing Women of the Downtown Eastside as members of a community who remember them positively and creatively.
Enriching lives and the community at large, the Women’s Memorial Quilt Project: Part 2 will be an important contribution of the Downtown Eastside Centre For The Arts to local programming from a creative and healing perspective.
The quilt-making workshops will be located at the Interurban Gallery, 1 E. Hastings St., Vancouver
DETAILED SCHEDULE – AFTERNOONS (Mondays and Tuesdays) from 2-5 pm
January 12-January 26 making squares
January 26-30 blocking & joining the squares
February 2-5 hanging the exhibit
February 5 exhibit opening
February 13 exhibit closes
February 14 Women’s March
People on site to facilitate the workshops:
Dalannah Gail Bowen project coordinator
Diane Wood workshop facilitator
A local Elder and two volunteers will also be present to help.