We are now a 501c3!
Please be patient while we work to update this website, and reorganize to reflect our growth over the past five years. You can still sign up to participate, donate to fund our work, or get in touch about opportunities to collaborate with your community.
Pandemics may end, but their effects remain.
We record and tell these stories through creative expression.
Our Mission:
Stitching the Situation envisions a world where the collective experiences and grief of the COVID-19 pandemic are memorialized and honored, and its ongoing effects are acknowledged and addressed with care and compassion.
We aspire to create a diverse and inclusive community where individuals can find healing, connection, and solace amidst the challenges of this crisis. Through our ongoing creative project, we aim to foster empathy, understanding, and resilience, while preserving a lasting archive of this historic period for future generations.
Our Process:
Stitching the Situation is a large-scale, communal textile project that documents the impact of COVID-19 in the US through collaboratively embroidered tapestries. Each stitch represents a person who has contracted COVID (color coded blue) or died from it (color coded red), as reported by the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus database. Thousands of stitches render images of personal experiences of, and perspectives on, the pandemic, thus creating both a visualization of data and an archive of this time.
Those most impacted by the virus are materialized in the stitches themselves, and the individual pieces (each represents one day of the pandemic period) manifest specific experiences—whether they be stories or images in memoriam of people who died of COVID, bereaved families and caregivers, people living with Long COVID, healthcare providers and other front line workers, folks who lost employment, businesses, or housing, or people living on reservations, in prisons, and other living spaces where access to protective measures and treatment were limited or nonexistent. Most who contribute to this project are themselves deeply affected by COVID.
Social and political change is often slow; this project aims to catalyze the reach of digital networks and collaborative making practices to cultivate an archive at a pace that can support and enable lasting social cohesion and equitable change.
Our roots:
Artist Heather Schulte began this project to deal with the anxiety that grew as COVID started to shake the world. She needed something to touch, to anchor herself amidst the chaos–a literal, physical thread to connect her hands to those of others as physical proximity diminished.
When the project grew outside of her capacity, she began sending stitching kits–free of charge–all over the country. Each piece represents one day’s data. Together, these images offer qualitative data and add context to the quantitative data represented through the individual stitches themselves. The patterns created record the past and present, making some sense and structure out of chaos and conflicting emotions in order to communicate and preserve these narratives for the future.
Stitching the Situation is a documentation of lived experience, not just data
Our Community:
Stitching the Situation has grown to become a collaborative and multilayered archive of the pandemic in the United States–a manifestation of communal care. This project utilizes practices of mutual aid as care (solidarity with—not charity for—others), rooted in previous activists’ work across multiple, intersectional social justice issues.
Communal work creating and utilizing textiles is universal to early human history across the world, and is one of, if not the first, forms of tools and technology used to assist and care for human needs. Stitching and creating offers quiet, meditative time to grieve. Working on textiles alongside others is an ancient tradition, one that can soothe grief and loss with repetitive physical movements handling soft materials.
We are committed to accessibility and make every effort to ensure anyone can access the project and participate in it as they are able. In addition to direct stitching, we accept individual stories in various media forms and pair them with artists and designers to create images for others to stitch.
Collaborative creation provides space for connection and healing
Our Work:
We are creating a collective, communal archive of this time, one that challenges and complicates any broad, simple narrative of what happened, to whom, how it affected our world, and what we should learn from it. We refuse the anonymity of mere numbers and insist these people, especially those who have suffered greatly, are valuable and worth remembering.
Similar to the AIDS crisis and its ongoing impacts today, without the immediate, grassroots work of people living with and dying from HIV, collecting and creating real-time archives–both informative and creative–and critiquing the system failures, ignorance, and dismissal along the way, we would have lost not only lives, but also the stories and first-hand experiences of the people who lived through that terrifying time.
Together, we collect, record, and share our stories
Our Future:
Stitching the Situation was started in the heart of the pandemic and adapts to changing circumstances and environments through its many iterations. It’s a continuation of events that profoundly affected us all and continue to reverberate.
Our work has been displayed at museums, libraries, galleries, schools, health care facilities, and numerous conferences and community events. As public funding supporting the arts and health care has been severely diminished by the current administration, we rely on collaborations with other institutions and private supporters now more than ever.
We look forward to future opportunities to share this project, expand its reach, and tell more stories. Get in touch to chat about how we can work together.
Every stitch, every story,
every cent makes a difference.
See how this project came about, and hear some testimonials from participants: