Diary

Quilts for Obama

by Adrienne LaFrance | Jan 14, 2009

When she got the telephone call, Charlene Hughes thought someone was playing a trick on her. The master quilter didn’t think she would really be singled out to participate in a Washington D.C., exhibit of quilts honoring President-elect Barack Obama.

“They called me early one morning and said they were collecting quilts from areas that were influential in Barack Obama’s life,” Hughes said. “I didn’t believe he was for real. He started talking about getting quits out of customs from Kenya, and so I thought maybe there was something to it. Then I looked him up on the Internet and realized he was a big deal.”

Hughes is one of 60 contributing to the “Quilts for Obama,” exhibit, which is presented as a joint collaboration between the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., the Women of Color Quilters Network and the Group for Cultural Documentation. It opened Jan. 11 and runs through the end of the month.

The exhibit was created as a way to welcome the Obama family to the capitol, and to celebrate the family’s roots and history. The quilts include 44 from across the U.S., one or more from Kenya, South Africa, Liberia and Ghana and more.

“Quilts for Obama,” curated by photo documenter Roland Freeman, who wrote on the Group for Cultural Documentation’s Web site how Obama’s presidential victory inspired this exhibit.

“My emotions overwhelmed me,” wrote Freeman of the moment he heard Obama had clinched the victory. “I could hardly speak. Then came the amazing images of worldwide jubilation. My mind drifted back to other seminal events that for me were just as emotionally life-changing: my participation in the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery; the 1963 March on Washington and Dr. King’s “I have a Dream” speech … I asked myself what I could do to help celebrate this victory and it occurred to me that a commemorative quilt exhibit was just the thing. And so it is.”

Hughes sent two quilts for the exhibit, one that is a traditional Hawaiian pattern, and one that she said represents the people of Hawaii.

“I sent him a small piece with ladies sitting around a quilting frame and they’re quilting an ‘ulu, a breadfruit,” she said. “I told him that that was typical of Hawaii, people working harmoniously together.”

Hughes, who founded the Maui Quilt Guild and is a member of the Oahu Quilt Guild, has been quilting since the early 1980s.

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