Like the evening applause neighborhoods awarded to essential workers coming home from hospital shifts, this two-piece art quilt pays homage to healthcare workers who risk their lives to care for victims of the coronavirus.
Because of White House incompetence, 2020 was a wasted year for control of the coronavirus in the US. Trump failed to publicize the facts, pitted states against one another to secure PPE for essential workers, pushed to reopen the economy before it was safe to do so, coddled and encouraged anti-maskers, and above all, displayed an unimaginable lack of empathy and compassion for the victims and their families. The result: a pandemic spiralling out of control. It’s hit nonwhite Americans, especially African Americans, especially hard, and magnified the systemic inequalities for healthcare that persist in the United States. And yet many Trump loyalists continue to spread the lie that Covid is just like a bad cold.
It’s up to all of us—not just the new Biden-Harris administration—to make sure that we get and keep the upper hand in 2021, and defeat the pandemic.
This diptych began with strip-pieced units fashioned in a class with Sarah Bond. I added other commercial fabrics and my own hand-printed fabrics, plus items from my stash of trash: animal feed bags, circles cut from aluminum cans, single-serve tea bag envelopes, mesh produce bags.
