WINTER 2026
ISSUE 05

Grandmother’s Garden is a feature-experimental documentary that derives its title from the classic hexagonal flowered quilt pattern. Drawing inspiration from the pattern’s landscape of flowers, the film considers the landscape of the United States as though it were a quilt. By examining the past and present production of quilts, the film reveals histories fundamental to the development of capitalism in the United States: enslavement, sharecropping, cotton production, westward expansion, and the textile industry are all threaded through the work of quiltmaking.

Since 2020, I have been filming quilts and photographs in museum and archival collections and meeting with active quilters from Oregon to Montana, Louisiana to Alabama, and Massachusetts to Maine to film their work and record their oral histories. Grandmother’s Garden explores what quilt materials – cotton fabric and batting – and the act of quilting itself communicate about women’s paid and unpaid work within fundamental histories of gendered and racialized exploitation in the United States. 

If most quilters today are retired baby-boomer women using materials manufactured overseas, quilting’s history involves the entire spectrum of women across the socioeconomic scale. This ranges from poor and working-class women who used feedsack cloth, worn clothes, and scraps to make quilts for their families to wealthier white women producing the opulent silk and velvet “crazy quilts,” popular in the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, quilting, like other forms of domestic labor and caregiving work that women have leveraged for money, has long been part of the informal economies women have created for themselves within and beyond the household. These nuanced histories defy stereotypes of what kinds of women were and continue to be quilters. Their quilts document a range of forms of women’s labor and creative expression.

Grandmother’s Garden asks how contemporary quilters confront US history and their lived experiences in the twenty-first century. If quilts reveal foundational aspects of the past, what do they teach us about our present economic and political landscape?