CT Covenant F
Silk, linen
24 x 24 inches
2022
Boston’s West End Urban Renewal Map
Hand-dyed indigo wool
11 inch x 32 inches x 1.75 inches
2026
About This Work
Our Social Fabric uses the classic American sampler form to engage the public in our long history of spatial exclusion and segregation. These works produced a series of cross stitched samplers that reimagined historical motifs to represent racially restrictive housing covenants from the 1930s that limited housing to only white occupants.
Other works in the series include knotted woven maps that represent, in tactile form, the destruction of working class and community of color neighborhoods through urban renewal. Side-by-side maps encourage viewers to feel the thick plush knots of the neighborhoods before they were razed to the ground, as represented in the second woven maps with shaved pile.
Publications and Presentations:
- 2023 “Getting Suburbs to Do Their Fair Share: Housing Exclusion and Local Response to State Interventions” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. 9(1): 126-144.
- 2023 American Sociological Association (ASA) Annual Meeting. “Our Social Fabric: Using Textiles to Engage the Public on Spatial Inequality”