EMMY Winning Short Video of the Project
Over 2,300 Stitchers
from
37 Countries World Wide
and all 50 States participated.
Since launching the project in May of 2019, we collected over 25 million hand-sewn stitches under one year.
See Images of panels under Community tab
Refugee is a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster. The number of global refugees has been doubling roughly every decade. —Panel by Penny Peters, Washington
From Kindergarten to Graduate students, schools from Dominican Republic, Canada, and the U.S.
from 5 year old to 91 year olds, 3 generations in a family, groups of diverse faith organizations
generously donated their time to build our community and express their support for the refugees
This project provides a beautifully resonant expression of art/ activism that raises awareness of the immense number of peoples forcibly displaced from their homelands by violence and natural disasters. By choosing basic stitching as the means to tally the number of people displaced, those who are new to art-activism were drawn to it and became part of our collective mending, of repair. Every participant from 5 to 91 years of age, from the asylum seeker to the artist who had never thought of their art as an expression of social activism, became an essential part of project.
The full installation of these panels gives the viewer a way of processing the enormity of 25 million – the approximate number of refugees estimated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees when this project started. But the panels also have an important narrative quality, both individually and in their collective presentation. Many panels convey images, symbols, and messages of solidarity, hope and community. The culmination of this community effort is a grand collection of diverse tapestries comprised of each participant’s unique expression of solidarity with the world’s refugees. We believe that the installation of this collection will raise awareness of the global refugee crisis and help people comprehend the enormity of it in a way that words alone cannot.