The Memorial Quilt & Lineage Project

Remembering Our Roots: The Memorial Quilt Project

Image of Diane “Hugs” Hugaert in the Fabled Asp Memorial Quilt.
(© Sharie Cohen Photography)

To honor Bay Area lesbians with disabilities who have joined the ancestors in the past 20 years, renowned African-American quilt-maker Karen Hampton has created a memorial quilt. Karen stitched and burned the images, names and words of a dozen of these women into a multi-layered tribute on hand-dyed fabric. Grounded in the African American story quilt tradition, Karen’s use of materials and symbols reflects the diaphanous, complex lives of disabled lesbians.

Fabled Asp Memorial Quilt
(Photo courtesy of San Francisco Public Library)

“We are both bold and hidden. These twelve women built community, among their friends, in the Bay Area, and throughout the US and beyond. They began and sustained resources for lesbians, feminists, people with disabilities. Active in their Native American, Jewish, Arab and African American communities, they wrote, sang and made visual art. Their political activism included membership in the Black Panthers, starting Ms. Magazine, founding the Women’s Cancer Resource Center to running for City Council (and so much more) – as out dykes. Filled with difficulty and delight, their lives were too short. Brilliant, confrontational, joyful and sexy, these women were warriors and peacemakers. The memorial quilt is a manifestation of literal and symbolic ways they touch those of their many communities who carry their legacies forward. Through text and texture, material and design, the quilt reflects the endurance of love, the deepening of roots, the whisper of their voices in this re-memory.”
—Barbara Ruth, resident poet of Fabled Asp

Women of the Quilt:

Click here to download a pdf of the Fabled Asp Memorial Quilt
and to read more about these women.

Photos of the quilt courtesy of Sharie Cohen Photography www.shariecohenphotography.com

Pat Parker

Take the rage that you can never settle for less- Pat Parker, Movement in Black

Jackie Winnow with Teya Schaffer

Nanci Stern

Pandoura Carpenter, Director of Wry Crips, with Sascha Bittner 

Lovey Ufland

Paula Gunn Allen

Silvia Kohan

The Lineage Project: Art and Mixed Media

Dominika Bednarska in front of a projected photo of Diane “Hugs” Hugaert, during a celebration of the Lineage Project. (Photo by E.G. Crichton)

Created in partnership with E. G. Crichton, the artist-in-residence of San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society, this specific project involves pairing a living person with a deceased one, asking the living one to spend time with the archive and create a response to it in any medium. The artist’s goal is to foster relationships between the living and the dead through a collaborative process with the artist, the archive, and the person who agrees to respond. Our participation in this larger project was unique insofar as E.G. Crichton specifically chose to pair lesbian disabled activists with the archives of deceased lesbian disabled activists:

Diane “Hugs” Hugaert (c.1955- 2001) Community leader, writer, member of the East Bay Pirates, and longstanding member of Wry Crips Disabled Women’s Theatre.
(Photo by Sherry Burkart)

Dominika Bednarska & Diane “Hugs” Hugaert (1955–2001)
www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/Lineage/Bednarska.html

Nomy Lamm & Silvia Kohan (1948­–2003)
www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/Lineage/Lamm2.html

Elissa Perry & Pat Parker (1944–1989)
www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/Lineage/Perry2.html

Laura Rifkin & Jessica Barshay (1940–1998)
www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/Lineage/Rifkin2.html

Note: Jessica Barshay is also the subject of a digital story and forthcoming film created by her partner, Judith Masur.