The Disappearing City

This series of three-hour workshops took place weekly at the Hudson Guild Senior Center over the course of eight weeks, and continued at Greenwich House for an additional eight weeks. Each senior produced a quilted work, approximately 36 x 36 inches in size, commemorating their starkest and most personal memories of New York City since they arrived. From March 19 to April 24, 2015 the quilts were on exhibit at the Hudson Guild Gallery, 441 W. 26th Street, Chelsea, New York.

The first step of the creative process was for each participant to choose a story and sketch out their quilt. Then, using embroidery and appliqué, they worked on the imagery, blocking out the main elements with pieces of fabrics and embroidering the details. The last part of the workshop was dedicated to turning these “fabric drawings” into quilts by stitching through stuffing and a second layer of fabric. Throughout the workshops, Amy Wilson discussed the status of crafts as an art form, and addressed basic aesthetic concepts such as composition, representation and the contested dichotomy between high and low forms of art.

The finished quilts were exhibited at the Hudson Guild Gallery and at Greenwich House, making the project visible to both the local communities and a wider audience of art enthusiasts. At the end of the project, each senior retrieved his or her quilt, which, one can imagine, will be passed on to children and grandchildren as part of their family legacy.

The Disappearing City utilized craft-making to convey a story and a sense of history. Indeed, traditional American quilts in the 18th and 19th century were not only practical items, but were also used to mark important moments in a person’s life such as births and weddings. Quilts often contained a great deal of information and details pertaining to individuals and, as a result, came to play a large role in preserving family history. Re-occurring motifs such as family trees helped develop and elaborate overlooked parts of American folk history.

The Disappearing City was an opportunity for these underserved members of society, many of whom lived in isolation, to come together around a shared experience. Through this project, they investigated and perpetuated a colloquial history of Chelsea at a time when the city is dramatically changing. By re-contextualizing their personal experience of gentrification through the symbolic vocabulary of quilting, these senior citizens reasserted their presence against Manhattan’s ongoing narrative of exclusion. As the city they knew continues to disappear, these quilts will help preserve the legacy of the people who have lived in Chelsea for many years, before its present gentrification, and need to have a voice.

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