STITCHING TIME

The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project
The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project
September 12 - December 13, 2025
This fall, the Fairfield University Art Museum celebrates 15 years of inspiring exhibitions and programs. At the same time, our nation marks a major milestone: the 250th anniversary – or Semiquincentennial – of the founding of the United States. During the 2025-2026 academic year, we will present a series of three exhibitions to commemorate this historic occasion, surrounding them with associated programs that help us reflect on our complex history, culture, and artistic legacy. We hope that these exhibitions inspire thoughtful dialogue about the state of our democracy, and the collective responsibility we share in shaping its future.
We are honored to launch this commemorative year with Stitching Time: The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project and Give Me Life: CPA Prison Arts Program, both on view in the Museum’s Walsh Gallery. These powerful exhibitions address the deep roots of racial injustice in the United States and illuminate the resilience, creativity, and political expression of individuals whose voices are too often silenced: incarcerated men in Louisiana’s Angola Prison and women held at Connecticut’s York Correctional Institution.
Stitching Time features 12 remarkable quilts created by men incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola, a former slave plantation turned prison. These collaborative works – accompanied by recorded interviews – represent a rare and deeply moving partnership between artists inside and outside prison walls. Together, they shine a light on those frequently excluded from historical and cultural narratives of artmaking.
Give Me Life presents 33 works by women artists currently or formerly incarcerated at York Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in Niantic, Conn. This diverse body of work includes drawing, sculpture, and textile-based pieces created with pencil, pen, oil pastel, yarn, fabric, acrylic, and more. This exhibition is made possible thanks to the collaboration of Community Partners in Action (CPA) Prison Arts Program – one of the longest-running initiatives of its kind in the country. Founded in 1875, CPA is celebrating 150 years of working to support and uplift individuals impacted by incarceration.
It has been a privilege to collaborate with Maureen Kelleher, co-founder of The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project, and Jeffrey Greene, who has led CPA’s Prison Arts Program since 1991. Their unwavering dedication, empathy, and vision are the driving forces behind these extraordinary exhibitions. I am deeply grateful for their partnership and for the opportunity to share the vital stories their programs bring to life with our audiences.
We are grateful to Don C. Sawyer III, PhD, Vice President of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, our faculty liaison for this exhibition, for his participation in helping to bring awareness to these exhibitions and their programs, and for helping us to assemble an outstanding panel for a faculty roundtable on incarceration in the United States.
We are very excited that acclaimed children’s book author, illustrator, and quilter, Lizzy Rockwell, is partnering with us on some quilt-related programming. She is the author of The All-Together Quilt – a children’s book about quilting and community. Rockwell will be presenting several quiltmaking events and programs in conjunction with the Stitching Time exhibition.
We are grateful to M&T Bank/Wilmington Trust for their support of this exhibition and their ongoing commitment to ensuring our programs remain high-quality, free, and open to all.
Thanks as always go to the exceptional Museum team for their hard work in bringing these two exhibitions and their associated programming to life: Curator of Education and Academic Engagement Michelle DiMarzo; Museum Registrar Megan Paqua; Museum Assistant Heather Coleman; and Museum Educator Elizabeth Vienneau. We are grateful for the additional support provided across the University by Kiersten Bjork, Susan Cipollaro, and Dan Vasconez, as well as by our colleagues in the Quick Center for the Arts, the Media Center, the Center for Arts and Minds, and Design and Print.
~ Carey Mack Weber
Frank and Clara Meditz Executive Director
I founded The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project with Kenya Baleech Alkebu in 2012. The goals of the Project are to teach the world about the prison hospice program, create a bridge for communication and support between inside quilters and free quilters, give voice to the quilters’ creativity, political consciousness, and more.
I am an artist, activist, and private investigator, who became interested in prisoners’ rights, and have since worked on numerous capital crimes and felony cases. I have found witnesses to cold death row cases and played a significant role in discovering new evidence that helped exonerate three men on death row. I am still a private investigator, and I now work at The Legal Aid Society NYC.
My co-founder, artist Kenya Baleech Alkebu, has been in Angola Prison for 47 years. We became pen pals over 32 years ago. Kenya has been quilting for more than 20 years inside. He also writes and mentors fellow inmates who struggle with addiction. Kenya worked in the prison law library for decades and volunteered for eight years in the prison’s hospice program, sitting with dying inmates, and helping with burials and funeral programs when families didn’t claim the inmate’s body.
Though Kenya and I were already creating quilts independently on our own, this incredible partnership wasn’t actualized until 2012. Kenya told me about the quilts the “lifer” hospice volunteers had made, how he learned to make quilts, and that the quilts were a way for the men to raise money for their hospice project. By selling their quilts, they were able to buy clothing and other necessities for dying men, sometimes even paying for a family member to visit to say a final farewell to their loved one. I felt the world must see the quilts and know their stories, and Kenya agreed.
~ Maureen Kelleher Director and Co-Founder
The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project
Sometimes the men inside the prisons, the inside quilters as they are called, have access to everything they need to get a quilt 100% finished. They create the theme, they set the design, and they put together the quilt top. They add in the batting, they put on the back, then they finish it all off with a border. When the quilt is 100% made inside the prison, the decorative quilting is usually machine quilted.
Sometimes the inside quilters will finish the quilt top only. Then the top is sent out, and the outside quilters finish the quilt, i.e., add the batting, put on a back and border, and do hand quilting. Sometimes one outside quilter will do 100% of the finishing; sometimes the quilt top, or the quilt in various stages of completion, will be mailed to another outside quilter and she will either do more on the quilt and send it back to Home Base, or she will finish the quilt completely, and then send it back to Home Base. Home Base is where I keep all of the quilts, as the cofounder and director of the Project.
Sometimes the inside quilters do 100% of the quilt’s design or set the theme for a quilt. Sometimes a quilt theme is the result of two members talking something over and deciding ‘yes, let’s make a quilt about that.’ Sometimes an outside quilter will set the theme, and all quilters –inside and out – are then invited to contribute to that quilt, to that theme. When this happens, there is usually a set deadline for all quilters who choose to contribute to that quilt. Whoever set the quilt’s theme is usually the lead quilter. All contributions get mailed to the lead quilter and he/ she will then finish the quilt.
The inside quilters have access to fabric sometimes. Sometimes they don’t have access to anything more than a small or medium-sized piece of fabric. Much of the time, the inside quilters can’t get large enough pieces of fabric to finish the back of the quilt. So, the quilt top is then mailed out, and the outside quilters will finish the quilt.
The quilt making process is dynamic. Dynamic is the key word, because the inside quilters are in prison. Sometimes two men are in the same dormitory and can work on a quilt top together. Sometimes a man will be sent to the cellblocks, and he can no longer work on a quilt top. Sometimes the men are moved to a new permanent location, and they must leave their sewing situation behind. Their daily lives can change 180 degrees in five minutes’ time. What they may or may not have access to changes in a matter of an hour sometimes. Because they are inmates, they will be moved from one prison location to another, at the order of prison administrators. The Project has always been and will always stay dynamic and flexible: that’s the nature of the inside quilters’ lives.
~ Maureen Kelleher Director and Co-Founder
The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project
All works are lent by Maureen Kelleher, © Maureen Kelleher
1. Kenya Baleech Alkebu (quilt design & quilting)
Cabin Gossip, ca. 2015
Mixed cotton blends
60 x 41 inches
2. Kenya Baleech Alkebu (quilt design & quilting)
Juneteenth, 2005
Mixed cotton blends
88 x 80 inches
3. Kenya Baleech Alkebu (quilt design)
Maureen Kelleher (quilting)
Black Windows, 2015
Mixed cotton blends
116 x 70 inches
4. Kenya Baleech Alkebu (quilt design)
Maureen Kelleher (quilting)
The Masks, 2015
Mixed cotton blends
82 x 73 inches
5. Kenya Baleech Alkebu (quilt design)
Maureen Kelleher (quilting)
Red, White and Baldwin, 2016
Mixed cotton blends and acrylic paint
90 x 90 inches
6. Kenya Baleech Alkebu (quilt design)
Maureen Kelleher (quilting)
Harriet Tubman, Making Tracks, 2016
Mixed cotton blends and polyester blends
96 x 72 inches
7. Kenya Baleech Alkebu (quilt design)
Maureen Kelleher (quilting)
The Lynching Trees, 2016
Mixed cotton blends
89 x 70 inches
8. Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore, Ramsey Orta, and Maureen Kelleher (quilt design)
Maureen Kelleher (quilting)
I Can’t Breathe. Eric Garner, 2018
Mixed cotton blends
63 x 46 inches
9. Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore, Etienne, Mutulu Shakur, and Maureen Kelleher (quilt design)
Maureen Kelleher (quilting)
James Baldwin: Quote #3, 2019
Mixed cotton blends
76 x 49 inches
10. Jackie Leon, Maureen Kelleher, Agna Brayshaw, Tex T. Mystro, Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore, Kenya Baleech Alkebu, Etienne, Greg Bishop, Kathleen Kelleher, and Jill Ray (quilt design)
Maureen Kelleher (quilting)
Amanda Gorman: The Hill We Climb, 2021
Mixed cotton blends and polyester blends, buttons, and various craft pieces
61 x 78 inches (overall)
11. Ellen Nelson, Maureen Kelleher, Kenya
Baleech Alkebu, Muhammad, Tex T.
Mystro, Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore, and Agna
Brayshaw (quilt design)
Ellen Nelson (quilting)
Pockets of Hope, 2022
Mixed cotton blends and polyester blends
44 x 63 inches
12. Kenya Baleech Alkebu (quilt design)
Maureen Kelleher (quilting)
Martin Got Arrested Again
[Dedicated to the memory and work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.], 2023
Mixed cotton blends and acrylic paint
48 x 64 inches
Events listed below with a location are live, in-person programs. When possible, those events will also be streamed on Arts & Minds Live and the recordings posted to the Museum’s YouTube channel.
Thursday, September 11, 5:30 p.m.
Opening Night Lecture: Stitching Time: The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project and Give Me Life: CPA Prison Arts Program
Jeffrey Greene, Program Manager, CPA Prison Arts Program; Maureen Kelleher, co-founder, The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project
Dolan School of Business Event Hall and streaming
Thursday, September 11, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Reception: Stitching Time: The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project and Give Me Life: CPA Prison Arts Program
Dolan School of Business Event Hall and Walsh Gallery
Saturday, October 4, noon
Gallery Talk: Maureen Kelleher, co-founder, The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project Walsh Gallery
Thursday, October 16, 5:30-7:30 p.m.
Community Quilting Workshop: led by artist Lizzy Rockwell Quick Center for the Arts Lobby
Cover image: Cat. 5
Tuesday, October 21, 5-6:30 p.m.
Faculty Roundtable: Incarceration in the U.S. Don Sawyer, PhD; Gregg Caruso, PhD; Kevin
O’Brien, S.J.; and Sonya Huber, MFA
Dolan School of Business Event Hall
Saturday, November 15, 12:30-2 p.m. and 2:30-4 p.m. (two sessions)
Family Day: Making Meaning with Quilts Quick Center for the Arts Lobby Registration required ; ages 4-10
Saturday, December 6, 2-4 p.m.
Quilting Bee Demo with Peace by Piece: The Norwalk Community Quilt Project Quick Center for the Arts Lobby and Walsh Gallery
fairfield.edu/museum/stitching-time
The Fairfield University Art Museum is deeply grateful to the following corporations, foundations, and government agencies for their generous support of this year’s exhibitions and programs. We also acknowledge the generosity of the Museum’s 2010 Society members, together with the many individual donors who are keeping our excellent exhibitions and programs free and accessible to all and who support our efforts to build and diversify our permanent collection. Arts Institute
September 12 - December 13, 2025
This fall, the Fairfield University Art Museum celebrates 15 years of inspiring exhibitions and programs. At the same time, our nation marks a major milestone: the 250th anniversary – or Semiquincentennial – of the founding of the United States. During the 2025-2026 academic year, we will present a series of three exhibitions to commemorate this historic occasion, surrounding them with associated programs that help us reflect on our complex history, culture, and artistic legacy. We hope that these exhibitions inspire thoughtful dialogue about the state of our democracy, and the collective responsibility we share in shaping its future.
We are honored to launch this commemorative year with Stitching Time: The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project and Give Me Life: CPA Prison Arts Program, both on view in the Museum’s Walsh Gallery. These powerful exhibitions address the deep roots of racial injustice in the United States and illuminate the resilience, creativity, and political expression of individuals whose voices are too often silenced: incarcerated men in Louisiana’s Angola Prison and women held at Connecticut’s York Correctional Institution.
Stitching Time features 12 remarkable quilts created by men incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola, a former slave plantation turned prison. These collaborative works – accompanied by recorded interviews – represent a rare and deeply moving partnership between artists inside and outside prison walls. Together, they shine a light on those frequently excluded from historical and cultural narratives of artmaking.
Give Me Life presents 33 works by women artists currently or formerly incarcerated at York Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in Niantic, Conn. This diverse body of work includes drawing, sculpture, and textile-based pieces created with pencil, pen, oil pastel, yarn, fabric, acrylic, and more. This exhibition is made possible thanks to the collaboration of Community Partners in Action (CPA) Prison Arts Program – one of the longest-running initiatives of its kind in the country. Founded in 1875, CPA is celebrating 150 years of working to support and uplift individuals impacted by incarceration.
It has been a privilege to collaborate with Maureen Kelleher, co-founder of The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project, and Jeffrey Greene, who has led CPA’s Prison Arts Program since 1991. Their unwavering dedication, empathy, and vision are the driving forces behind these extraordinary exhibitions. I am deeply grateful for their partnership and for the opportunity to share the vital stories their programs bring to life with our audiences.
We are grateful to Don C. Sawyer III, PhD, Vice President of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, our faculty liaison for this exhibition, for his participation in helping to bring awareness to these exhibitions and their programs, and for helping us to assemble an outstanding panel for a faculty roundtable on incarceration in the United States.
We are very excited that acclaimed children’s book author, illustrator, and quilter, Lizzy Rockwell, is partnering with us on some quilt-related programming. She is the author of The All-Together Quilt – a children’s book about quilting and community. Rockwell will be presenting several quiltmaking events and programs in conjunction with the Stitching Time exhibition.
We are grateful to M&T Bank/Wilmington Trust for their support of this exhibition and their ongoing commitment to ensuring our programs remain high-quality, free, and open to all.
Thanks as always go to the exceptional Museum team for their hard work in bringing these two exhibitions and their associated programming to life: Curator of Education and Academic Engagement Michelle DiMarzo; Museum Registrar Megan Paqua; Museum Assistant Heather Coleman; and Museum Educator Elizabeth Vienneau. We are grateful for the additional support provided across the University by Kiersten Bjork, Susan Cipollaro, and Dan Vasconez, as well as by our colleagues in the Quick Center for the Arts, the Media Center, the Center for Arts and Minds, and Design and Print.
~ Carey Mack Weber
Frank and Clara Meditz Executive Director
This is the Prison Arts Program – Marina Mills, in tears, sitting across from me, in a tiny cinderblock room.
We were recording the audio for a series of “Talking Paintings,” a project I’d undertaken with a group of artists at York Correctional Institution, Connecticut’s women’s prison, in collaboration with the state’s Department of Public Health. The paintings were shaped like blood cells, except one shaped like the HIV virus, illustrating personal experiences with HIV/AIDS, and each was to have a button on it you would press to hear the artist speak.
Marina had just recorded her Department of Correction approved script, “If you pushed this button, you are probably already at risk…at risk of a disease. A disease is any poison that invades you and alters your quality of life. AIDS is what this artwork is about, but don’t be fooled. A disease is anything that separates family from the gift of love, like hate, violence, prejudice. When you hurt, we do too. Stop the pain. Hate a disease, not the person needing love.”
Marina finished reading her powerful words into the microphone and I asked if she wanted to hear it back. She nodded, I handed her the headphones, she put them on and listened to herself. As the playback ended, she took the headphones off, and she was crying.
She said, “I never heard my own voice before. It’s beautiful.”
That’s it…that’s Prison Arts.
~ Jeffrey Greene Prison Arts Program Manager Community Partners in Action
Give Me Life is an exhibition of artwork created by women incarcerated at York Correctional Institution in Niantic, Conn., as part of workshops organized by Jeffrey Greene and the Community Partners in Action’s Prison Arts Program over the past 30 years.
Community Partners in Action (CPA) is a human services nonprofit dedicated to the rehabilitation of, and advocacy for, adults and youth in the criminal justice system throughout Connecticut. CPA operates many programs, including youth residential treatment, communitybased alternatives, transitional housing, work release, prison arts, and innovative reentry centers in the community. Founded in 1875, their direct service model is amplified through advocacy and an extensive network of partners who are committed to the overall welfare and dignity of those in their care, and the community at large. CPA is celebrating their 150 th anniversary in 2025!
The Prison Arts Program , initiated in 1978, is CPA’s longest running program, and one of the longest running projects of its kind in the United States. The program works inside Connecticut prisons to positively and constructively change the lives of the incarcerated and the prison environment by encouraging unique, personal, and evolving artistic pursuits. These pursuits can engender hope in a hopeless place. Participants develop purpose, creativity, self-discipline, work ethic, self-esteem, technical and communication skill development, thoughtfulness, introspection, critical thinking, and peacefulness… tools for a productive, authentic, and profound life.
All works are from the collection of the Community Partners in Action, unless otherwise noted.
1. Jennifer Brown
The Ashes of Empty Dreams, 2009
Pastel and collage on paper
10 x 8 inches
2. Norma Claudio
Watch Each Other Grow, 2005
Pencil on paper
11 x 14 inches
3. Lynda Gardner
Birds Protecting Children, 2006
Pen on Bristol board
14 x 17 inches
4. Constance Griffin
Choices Start When You Are Young, 2004
Colored pencil on paper
18 x 12 inches
5. Gillian Estremera aka Jillian Vasquez
A Lonely Dark Place, 2006
Oil pastel on Bristol board
12 x 9 inches
6. Pierlette Jones
Dream Killers, 2013
Colored pencil on Bristol board
12 x 9 inches
7. Pierlette Jones
Shattered Self-Image, 2014
Colored pencil on Bristol board
12 x 9 inches
8. Nia-Mae McSwain
Drawings for My Mother, 2016
Marker on paper
2 drawings, 1, 8 1/2 x 11 inches, 1, 11 x 8 1/2 inches
9. Mia McSwain
Nia-Mae, My Daughter, 2016
Yarn, thread and fabric
24 x 18 x 2 inches
10. Luzann Shirley
Broken Hearted, Angry, 2007
Colored pencil on Bristol board
12 x 9 inches
11. Kathleen Wyatt
My Island Romance, 2005
Pencil on paper
14 x 16 1/2 inches
12. Yongmi Olsen
Breaking Through Narrow Views (The Knowing), 2007
Pen and colored pencil on Bristol board
14 x 17 inches
Lent by the artist
13. Yongmi Olsen
Confused, 2020
Pen and colored pencil on Bristol board
11 x 14 inches
Lent by the artist
14. Yongmi Olsen
Dormant I, 2006
Pen and colored pencil on Bristol board
14 x 11 inches
Lent by the artist
15. Yongmi Olsen
Dormant II, 2006
Pen and colored pencil on Bristol board
14 x 11 inches
Lent by the artist
16. Yongmi Olsen
Dreaming Birds, 2008
Pen and colored pencil on Bristol board
16 x 23 1/8 inches
Lent by the artist
17. Yongmi Olsen
Escape from the Cell, 2005
Pen and colored pencil on Bristol board
17 x 14 inches
Lent by the artist
18. Yongmi Olsen
Greenhouse, 2006
Pen and colored pencil on Bristol board
17 x 14 inches
Lent by the artist
19. Yongmi Olsen
Interconnection, 2006
Pen and colored pencil on Bristol board
11 x 14 inches
Lent by the artist
20. Yongmi Olsen
Pain Turns to Beauty, 2008
Pen and colored pencil on Bristol board
14 x 11 inches
Lent by the artist
21. Yongmi Olsen
Self Portrait, 2020
Pen and colored pencil on Bristol board
11 x 14 inches
Lent by the artist
22. Yongmi Olsen
Silence passes chaos (transforming), 2006
Pen and colored pencil on Bristol board
11 x 14 inches
Lent by the artist
23. Yongmi Olsen
Somewhat damaged but O.K. , 2021
Pen and colored pencil on Bristol board
14 x 11 inches
Lent by the artist
24. Yongmi Olsen
What’s Beyond?, 2008
Pen and colored pencil on Bristol board
14 x 11 inches
Lent by the artist
25. Yongmi Olsen
Walking Suicide, 2008
Pen and colored pencil on Bristol board
11 x 14 inches
Lent by the artist
26. Traci Bernardi
Scrappy the Rain Dog, 2014
Collaged cardboard and paper
24 x 22 x 16 inches
27. Sherail Cooper
God is Watching, 2017
Acrylic on small cardboard supply box
10 1/2 x 14 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
28. Beverley Martin & June Seger
Pond, 2016
Crocheted blanket
40 x 68 inches
Private Collection
Courtesy of the artist and Community
Partners in Action Prison Arts Program
29. Lashanda Gregory & June Seger
Hats, 2023-2024
Variable size/dimensions
Collection of the artist
Courtesy of the artist and Community
Partners in Action Prison Arts Program
30. Beverley Martin
Looking Through My Window, 2023
Pen and colored pencil on Bristol board
14 x 11 inches
Lent by the artist
31. Madelyne Martinez
Nothing is Perfect or Makes Sense, 2024
Pen, colored pencil, and marker on
Bristol board
19 x 24 inches
Lent by the artist
32. Madelyne Martinez
Untitled, 2023
Pen, colored pencil, and marker on Bristol board
19 x 24 inches
Lent by the artist
33. Felicia Strong
Psalm 23, 2023-2024
Pen, marker, and collage on paper
11 x 14 inches
Lent by the artist
Events listed below with a location are live, in-person programs. When possible, those events will also be streamed on Arts & Minds Live and the recordings posted to the Museum’s YouTube channel.
Thursday, September 11, 5:30 p.m.
Opening Night Lecture: Stitching Time: The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project and Give Me Life: CPA Prison Arts Program
Jeffrey Greene, Program Manager, CPA Prison Arts Program; Maureen Kelleher, co-founder, The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project
Dolan School of Business Event Hall and streaming
Thursday, September 11, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Reception: Stitching Time: The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project and Give Me Life: CPA Prison Arts Program
Dolan School of Business Event Hall and Walsh Gallery
Saturday, October 4, noon
Gallery Talk: Maureen Kelleher, co-founder, The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project Walsh Gallery
Thursday, October 16, 5:30-7:30 p.m.
Community Quilting Workshop: led by artist Lizzy Rockwell
Quick Center for the Arts Lobby
Cover image: Cat. 12
Tuesday, October 21, 5-6:30 p.m.
Faculty Roundtable: Incarceration in the U.S. Don Sawyer, PhD; Gregg Caruso, PhD; Kevin O’Brien, S.J.; and Sonya Huber, MFA
Dolan School of Business Event Hall
Saturday, November 15, 12:30-2 p.m. and 2:30-4 p.m. (two sessions)
Family Day: Making Meaning with Quilts
Quick Center for the Arts Lobby Registration required ; ages 4-10
Saturday, December 6, 2-4 p.m.
Quilting Bee Demo with Peace by Piece: The Norwalk Community Quilt Project Quick Center for the Arts Lobby and Walsh Gallery
fairfield.edu/museum/stitching-time
The Fairfield University Art Museum is deeply grateful to the following corporations, foundations, and government agencies for their generous support of this year’s exhibitions and programs. We also acknowledge the generosity of the Museum’s 2010 Society members, together with the many individual donors who are keeping our excellent exhibitions and programs free and accessible to all and who support our efforts to build and diversify our permanent collection. Arts Institute