The Belle Grove Memorial Quilt Project: A Conversation with Artist Carole Gary Staples


How did you get connected with the Belle Grove Memorial Quilt Project?

[Belle Grove] had the names of 270 people [who were enslaved at the plantation]. They wanted someone to take these names and put them into a quilt.

First, they had a local embroidery guild [with the help of community members during workshops] embroider each person’s name and, if they had it, birthdate. They hand-embroidered each and every name on blocks.

Then [Belle Grove Executive Director] Kristen [Laise] reached out to Dr. Mazloomi for some help with locating a quilter, and then Dr. Mazloomi contacted me. Ultimately, I got selected to do it [in] 2023.

What was your artistic process for this project?

The first thing I did was think, how are we going to do this in a way that honors the families? I decided early on that I was going to do something different to each block, to make the family stand out and be recognized.

I had a size constraint. [Belle Grove has] a wall that is 97 inches by 84 wide [where the quilt will be displayed]. That’s when it got really hard, because 270 is a lot of names to get within those measurements. I spent months trying to figure out what size to cut these names down to.

I asked a quilt friend to come over and look at my dilemma. Like an architect when they do a small model, we shrunk it down, like a scaled model.



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