As a volunteer for the Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative, I am always thrilled to learn that our newest traveling exhibit is on its way to a new locale and opening to a new audience.
Alzheimer's Illustrated: From Heartbreak to Hope continues its five-year journey across the United States with a stop at the Berkeley Square, A Colonial Community, in Hamilton, OH June 8-10, 2012.
The exhibit will hang at Berkeley Square, 100 Berkeley Drive, Hamilton, OH. Berkeley Square is off of NW Washington Boulevard, close to Hamilton Freshman School, near the intersection of Cleveland Avenue and NW Washington.
Show hours are 11 to 5 on Friday and Saturday; 11 to 2 on Sunday. Free parking. No admission.
Alzheimer's Illustrated: From Heartbreak to Hope is an exhibit of quilts about Alzheimer's sponsored by the Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative (AAQI). Fifty-four small format art quilts (9" x 12") illustrate the disease from a variety of perspectives.
These small quilts hang among 182 "Name Quilts," each 6 inches wide and 7 feet tall, which carry the names of more than 10,000 individuals who have/had Alzheimer's or a related dementia. The names of loved ones, written on fabric patches by family members and friends, honor the 5.4 million Americans in the United States struggling with Alzheimer's disease.
As a volunteer for AAQI, with 13 family member names among the "Name Quilts" and two of my own small format art quilts among the 54 art quilts, I feel so personally connected to both this cause and to this exhibit.
If you are anywhere near this or any future location, please check it out. And if you see my two art quilts, please take a photo of them on display and mail the photos to me ! I have had a number of blogging friends attend the quilt shows and therefore also see the AAQI display and so far, none of them noticed my quilts or made the connection to my being part of the exhibit and thus...no photos for me, yet!
My quilts are:
#5211 - Mama's Brain Got Tangles...but Mama's Still Inside
Michele M. Bilyeu
Salem, OR USA
Artist's Statement: Like my mother's memory, this art quilt consists of many layers, tangles, and threads...with spots of clarity and light hidden amidst the colorful (but often chaotic) surface layer.
Dedication: For my mother who continually pushes through the advancing layers and tangles of Alzheimer's with infinite grace and humor.
#6399 - The Alzheimer's Prayer
Michele Bilyeu
Salem, OR USA
Dedication: In honor and memory of my father, a loving care giver, and with the deepest love for my mother who is now in her fifth year of Alzheimer's. In spite of being blind, diabetic, and unable to walk, she still reaches out her heart to us with love.
And our talented quilt make Julie Sefton, also from our Liberated Challenge group has this beautiful quilt and has also contributed to the actual quilting of some of the purple name quilts, as well.
Julie Sefton
Bartlett, TN
Artist's Statement: Her name was Lura. The middle child, she survived her older brother and younger sister. Lura was the first woman to work in the cost accounting department before becoming a full-time mother, homemaker, and to her great joy, a grandmother to five grandsons. As we watched the woman we loved slowly disappear beneath the relentless progression of Alzheimer's, we felt powerless. Now, I stitch for AAQI and remember.
And last but not least, Jean Sophie made a quilt that also is in the exhibit.
Jean-sophie Wood
Dallas, TX USA
Artist's Statement: This piece was inspired by a tree in my backyard when I lived in Lansing, Michigan that tenaciously held onto it's last leaf through January, long after all the other leaves on all the other trees had fallen and been buried under the snow.
Dedication: For Charlie, an Irishman who lived around the corner, on the same floor as me in a an apartment building on the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco. I experienced him first as a friendly neighbor who always said hello whenever and wherever our paths crossed and later as someone who reacted in fear and confusion whenever I said hello to him. I didn't know what was going on with Charlie until the building manager told me that some family members had come from Ireland to take him back and care for him because of his Alzheimer's diagnosis.
"Alzheimer's Illustrated: From Heartbreak to Hope"
Click here to learn more about this extraordinary exhibit
and how you can bring it to your community.
