On February 26, 2025, the Los Angeles based community work of Ashley J. May, second year Anthropology Ph.D. student, will go on display at the Sarah Doyle Center Gallery. A special selection of books from her children’s book archive, the Lil’ Free Bird Library, will be on display alongside the Kin Folk Archive Quilt, a community quilt made for the project. Sarah Doyle Center will be hosting an opening event on Wednesday, February 26th, Threading Black Feminist Memory: a community quilt gathering and conversation. The book collection and the quilt can be viewed throughout February and March.
The Lil’ Free Bird Library is a collection of rare and vintage books deaccessioned by public libraries. Grounded in the Black women’s literary renaissance of the 1970’s, and the Black liberation literature found in her late grandmother’s home collection, this project reimagines what we understand to be our libraries and our archives, taking up childhood as a site of collective Black study. Thinking with and beyond the library-as-system, it assembles a hyperlocal archive of books that form what she argues to be foundational contributions to the Black children’s literary canon.
In 2024, the Kin Folk Archive Quilt was made in the signature quilt tradition to join the work of the Lil’ Free Bird Library. Signature and friendship quilts have long been used by quilters to embed communities into the surface of a quilt, sometimes archiving the members of a family or the donors who gave to a social justice cause. An example of this can be seen in a recently found quilt, now housed at the Michigan State University Museum, which documents the Black Bottom neighborhood of Detroit, a historically Black neighborhood wiped out by urban renewal in the mid 20th century. The Kin Folk Archive Quilt, hand stitched by Ashley’s collaborator, Dr Jess Bailey - art historian, third generation quilter, and Lecturer in Premodern Art History at the University of Edinburgh, builds on this rich signature quilt tradition. Eight talented embroiderers - Tenille, Sharbreon, Judit, Lisa, Esther, Sarah, Leya & Tabara - stitched this constellation of Black women writers into the quilt so that children know and understand this legacy.
QUILT DETAILS:
The Kin Folk Archive Quilt, quilter: Dr Jess Bailey (University of Edinburgh), Embroidery: Lisa Canham, Judit Gummlich, Sarah Foot, Tenille Foreman, Tabara N’Diaye, Sharbreon Plummer, Leya Williams, and Esther Wilson. Curation of authors & project director: Ashley J. May (Brown University). Linen & cotton. Dimensions 69.5” L x 68.5” W. Made in London, UK 2023-24 for use in story circles in the US lead by May.
The quilt is made from linen, cotton batting, and vintage cotton curtains. The block design is an original pattern drafted by Dr Jess Bailey in response to signature quilt traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries found across North America. At its core, the block design references a ‘nine patch’ in recognition of the first quilt block children are traditionally taught to sew. The colors of the quilt draw on the California landscape which first situated May’s work. The quilt was made by Dr Jess Bailey and a team of embroiderers between the UK, Europe, and the US: Lisa Canham, Judit Gummlich, Sarah Foot, Tenille Foreman, Tabara N’Diaye, Sharbreon Plummer, Leya Williams, and Esther Wilson. The quilting occurred communally at a traditional quilting bee alongside a grief quilt for Palestine made by Bailey and her students in London, 2024. The Kin Folk Archive Quilt has been taught in university classrooms and displayed at Rabbits Road Press, a community printing press in East London.