UND Community Quilt Project will stitch campus together

Campuswide project aims to let 144 fabric squares tell the story of UND’s tightly knit community

What better way to embrace the frigid North Dakota winter than with quilts and crafts?

On Dec. 1, departments from across the University braved the cold, post-Thanksgiving weather to join the launch event for the UND Community Quilt Project, a campuswide effort to create a California king–sized quilt celebrating UND’s Year of Community.

From now until May, departments across campus will collaborate to design 144 squares telling the story of UND. The squares will eventually be quilted by Amy Bail, longarm quilter at Quilter’s JEM in East Grand Forks.

During his launch event speech, UND President Andrew Armacost traced the project back to his Wake Up to UND address last September, where “community” was introduced as UND’s Word of the Year. At the Wake Up to UND event, Armacost used the image of a quilt to visualize UND’s tightly knit community — a metaphor that inspired Honors Program Director Merie Kirby and Assistant Professor of Music Whitney Mayo to approach him with this collaborative proposition.

“How amazing is this, just to build the spirit of what we’re undertaking with this UND Community Quilt Project,” Armacost said at the launch event. “Quilting is about coming together, and about piecing together the artistry, the ideas and the feelings of everybody who’s involved.”

The quilt’s design is being led by Mayo and Kirby; Tamba-Kuii Bailey, associate vice president and advisor the president for Community and Belonging; and Stacey Borboa-Peterson of the Hilyard Center. Volunteers from the North Star Quilter’s Guild will assist at various stages of the project.

“The project itself is a community quilt, and each of the different blocks will be submitted by different areas or different units across campus,” said Mayo, who was stationed at a table in back to give participants the rundown. “For folks with zero quilting experience, this project is completely accessible. We want to bring in as much involvement as possible.”

As Mayo spoke she gestured to “ideation stations” in the back of the room, where participants could sketch out ideas on 81/2-inch paper squares with markers and learn quilting basics.

“Really, the possibilities are endless for what those images and icons can look like,” Mayo said.

For Mayo, quilting is both craft and metaphor.

“Quilting is interesting because it’s both a verb and a noun,” she said. “Quilting can mean putting all of the pieces together, but quilting is also all of the stitching that goes on the top that holds the parts together.”

Tamba-Kuii Bailey emphasized the project’s deeper meaning: making UND’s values visible in cloth.

“Part of the vision for UND says that the University of North Dakota is a place where everyone knows that they belong, a place that embraces diversity of people, perspectives and ideas,” Bailey said. With community members “from across the country, across the world,” he added, “we’re from different places, from different walks of life, but we come together, that we make up one community, one UND.”

Bailey connected the quilt to the concept of “place-building” in higher education — the work of turning a campus into a community with shared meaning.

“As we come together for this project, my hope is that we find hope, that we find resiliency, we find community, and we find people that we can connect with.”

Stacey Borboa-Peterson of the Hilyard Center, who chairs the UND Community Quilt Project Committee, walked launch attendees through the logistics of stitching a whole university into 144 squares.

“There are 144 squares on this quilt. There are more than 144 departments on this campus, and so there isn’t a way for every department to get their own,” she said. “But that’s the beauty of this. It is going to provide an opportunity to come together as a community and create squares together.”

Peterson urged units and departments to treat their squares collaborative efforts and reasons to join together.

Suggestions include lunches, staff-meeting activities and ways to bring students — including online learners — directly into the design process. Each completed square will be accompanied by a short, written description, so observers can learn the story of every square.

The finished quilt is likely to be displayed in the Memorial Union and at commencement ceremonies as a physical encapsulation of UND’s Year of Community.

Armacost closed his remarks with a story about a friend’s old Buick, whose bumper sticker read, “I’d rather be quilting.” As UND’s Community Quilt project begins, he suggested that phrase may become a campuswide mantra.

“When we’re having those days where we’re having those challenges,” he said, “we should say, both literally and figuratively, I’d rather be quilting. I want to build community.”