Community Through Quilting
On Thursday, April 2, an excited group of students and faculty gathered at Santa Monica College's Black Collegians Center to continue working on a quilt themed “togetherness and community.”
Founded in 1989 by Roger Moore, the center got its start after Moore identified an achievement gap affecting African American students and sought to provide a place where students could get support. Moore recruited Deyna Hearn to run the program and decide what services would be provided, including tutoring opportunities and assistance with raising GPAs to ultimately help students transfer to four-year universities.
Jocelyn Winn, the program’s student services specialist, originally had the idea for the quilt in 2019, before COVID swept the nation, and the Black Collegians Center made its services remote. The idea stemmed from a childhood road trip Winn took to visit a plantation located in Natchitoches, Louisiana, the city where her grandmother is from.
The plantation showed the room where the enslaved people worked, creating yarn from the cotton they picked.
“Everything was done in this little thing,” she said. Winn described a little wooden shelter shack. Inside, there was a quilt you could touch at the time. Winn learned about how quilts were made from scraps.
“It was a beautiful quilt,” Winn said.
After learning about how women in Black communities still came together to quilt, still using scraps, she said she found a deep metaphorical connection as well.
“We are given scraps to eat, and we made delicacies out of those scraps. And the same way, creating, you know, these art pieces now out of scraps,” Winn said. ” I wanted it to be the students and the staff, kind of working together because the way these quilting circles worked for these groups and women that will quilt together.”
Winn highlighted the importance of spaces where older women mentor younger women and shared life experiences, having conversations about topics like perimenopause and menopause.
“This was the original stage,” Winn said.
Deborah Kabongoa, a student from Congo with knowledge of patterns and textiles, was invited in by Winn to make the quilt a reality. “Quilting is based on sewing,” she said.
Although Kabonga had no prior quilting experience, it prompted her to reflect on the tradition’s history of bringing women together to share personal stories, and the sense of unity that SMC has given her.
“I would love to make one quilt that represents how I feel being here at SMC,” Kabongoa said.
Harmony Simpson, an IXD student, discovered the project after interviewing Jocelyn Winn for an oral history preservation assignment. “Hearing about the quilt was right up my alley,” she said. It sparked a personal connection and opened a conversation about her family history and its role in shaping identity.
“It's essentially an archive of some sort and the fact that everyone is contributing with their own experiences and different interpretations of what community is, I felt was really important,” Simpson said.