Wake Up Everybody

Wake Up Everybody is a collaborative quilt created by Crafting Change, a craft activism group, to raise awareness about issues of gentrification and displacement that face their community in Roxbury and Dorchester. The group includes women from Whittier Street Health Center’s PeaceFull Hands art therapy sewing group, their friends, and community members. The quilt features embroidered and appliquéd images of historical community spaces that no longer exist and former local and national leaders who created neighborhoods that acted as a place of sanctuary for marginalized folks. The group chose to create a quilt, an object that is often associated with the home and comfort, to call attention to the discomfort that gentrification and displacement has created in the neighborhoods they have called home for most of their lives. Through exhibiting their quilt the group hoped to engage viewers in reconsidering these communities, the people who live there, and who development helps and hurts.