​Kenya Baleech Alkebu, co-founder,  incarcerated 48+ years

Maureen Kelleher, co-founder, free

It all started in 2012 with a phone call between pen pals Maureen Kelleher and Kenya Baleech Alkebu. Kenya talked about his time as a prison hospice volunteer and how the hospice volunteers made quilts to earn money to help the dying. Maureen remembered her first try at making a quilt. Maureen felt the existence of a hospice program behind walls that included making quilts was something very unique, and that the world needed to know about. Kenya agreed. One thing led to another, and The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project was born. 

 

The Project is now a full-fledged professional art exhibition of quilts of exceptional beauty and power that reflect an American uniqueness. The quilts confront, head-on, some heavy-duty topics such as lynching in the USA, racism, and police brutality. They contain American heroes such as Harriet Tubman, James Baldwin, and John Lewis. They remember Eric Garner, George Floyd, and Solomon Northup. They celebrate diversity, inclusion, friendship, love, strength, and more. They demonstrate how two worlds -  incarcerated and free - come together in artistic collaboration. The quilts are creative ambassadors that have a lot to ‘say’ to the world.

 

Folks come away from the exhibition feeling optimistic, hopeful, energized,  more informed, awestruck, and impressed. The exhibition allows the public to learn about how life is lived in prison and what men there can be a part of. The quilts provide a creative window into the lives of men who have, for the most part, been forgotten, but nonetheless have stayed active, creative, and engaged in the world.

 

The exhibition is a wonderful teaching tool for students of textile arts, art, sociology, legal studies, African American studies, and much, much more. 

Some of our members, past and present, include: Native American activist and freed political prisoner, Leonard Peltier, political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal,  Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore (who spent 37.5 years in solitary confinement alongside “The Angola 3”), Abu Ali (who spent 35 years on Tennessee death row), and  Black Liberation activists, Mutulu Shakur, and Jalil Muntaqim.