Grief Quilt for Palestine - Artist Talk
Join Dr Jess Bailey for a lecture about grief quilt making, followed by a conversation with Dr Sharbreon Plummer.
Thinking Culture | School of Culture & Creative Arts | College of Arts & Humanities
Date: Thursday 30 July 2026
Time: 18:00 - 19:30
Venue: Humanity Lecture Theatre
Category: Public lectures, Academic events, Sanctuary, Community events
Speaker: Jess Bailey | Sharbreon Plummer
Join art historian and quilter Dr Jess Bailey (University of Edinburgh, @publiclibraryquilts) for a lecture about the histories, practices, and methods of grief quilt making in North America and the UK. We will explore how quilters of the past negotiated and honoured grief through working with cloth while making useful love for present and future kin. We will also consider the ways quilting traditions offer current communities' space to process trauma together.
After the short lecture, Jess will be joined by author and curator Dr Sharbreon Plummer, who is visiting Scotland from New Orleans where she writes about Black feminist textile traditions including quilts for a conversation. Jess and Sharbreon Co-Founded the People's Quilting Bee together where they bring historical quilts into dialog with contemporary struggles for liberation. Dr Jess Bailey is the author of Many Hands Make a Quilt: Short Histories of Radical Quilting. Dr Sharbreon Plummer is the author of Stories in the Seams: A People’s History of Black Quilts and Their Makers.
Grief Quilt for Palestine
This event is part of a special programme presented by Thinking Culture, around the Grief Quilt for Palestine. In June 2024, a group of students at University College London and The Slade School of Fine Art curated an intervention at the MA Degree Show about their university’s complicity in funding genocide through its investment portfolio. The UCL Action For Palestine’s exhibition, titled the Palestine Zone, provided explicit evidence of this complicity in arms manufacturers, advocated for divestment and an end to apartheid, and celebrated Palestinian culture in the face of attempted erasure since the 1948 Nakba النَّكْبَة & before. Further information.
