25 Million Stitches

One Stitch, One Refugee

(March 1–July 28, 2024)

25 Million Stitches: One Stitch, One Refugee is an artistic statement from the international community about human displacement, immigration, and solidarity. It is an aggregation of 25 million hand-sewn stitches, each representing a single displaced human being as counted in the UN’s High Commissioner on Refugees 2019 report. The stitches are bound to 407 muslin banners, each 14’ long. Building this physical representation of this statistic required participation from 2,300 stitches from 37 countries, all 50 U.S. states. 

25 Million Stitches was initiated and conceived in May 2019 by Guest Curator Jennifer Kim Sohn, a multimedia artist and activist, in Sacramento, CA, to create a community of art activists to visually document the enormity of the number of refugees in the world and to sustain the concern for the refugees in the minds of global citizens. 

Although it took over 9 months of slow community building, the project gained global traction by the 10th month when 23 million additional hand-sewn stitches were sent in from all over the U.S. and world, surpassing the goal of collecting 25 million stitches. The stitches were counted, panel by panel, through the methods of sample counting four 1 x 1 inch squares and multiplying and averaging the number of stitches. 

For this project, Sohn relied on a dedicated team of volunteers. Many of the time-consuming tasks: responding and sending out panels, collating the stitcher data, photographing and recording the panels, counting the stitches, sharing the progress through social media, combining panels into 9–14ft flags for installation, and re-adjusting height of the flags for various venues, are all managed by volunteers.

How does making 25 million stitches help refugees? The team believes that this project is a way for them to engage with this global crisis instead of ignoring it. And even though no single stitch can fully represent an individual, the act of stitching and the resulting work will help bring attention to the scale of the crisis and build communities of concerned activists.