Furniture Design Course at RISD Investigates the History and Craft of Quilting

How can craft serve as a lens for understanding the complex networks—the economies, traditions, material resources, and politics—that cultivate material culture? A new required elective for Furniture Design juniors called Cultures of Production investigates the ways that meaning is embedded in material culture and focuses on peoples and approaches that have been historically underrepresented in American art and design education.

The class is part of a college-wide initiative in which all undergraduate students are required to complete coursework that challenges the canon of their discipline and foregrounds artists and designers whose work and methods have been erased, appropriated, or otherwise overlooked by most Western-centric institutions. The initiative was led by a group of faculty members in response to student activists pushing for racial and social equity in the classroom. The new courses challenge dominant art and design histories in a wide variety of ways, from questioning normative techniques to discussing racial and economic aspects of the work to cultivating an understanding of the power dynamics and ethics implicit in pedagogy.

The Furniture Design department’s first such offering focuses on quilting and is co-taught by faculty members Megan Callahan 11 FD and Siena Smith 18 TX. They are introducing students to a wide range of quilting processes and practices, including patchwork piecing, appliquė, paper piecing, Ssamsol stitching for Bojagi, and hand-quilting on a frame.

Image

Each assignment asks students to consider what histories are embedded in the materials, what happens when you work with less-than-ideal materials, and how an artist’s choices might reflect systems of labor, consumption, privilege, or care. “The goal,” says Callahan, “is to cultivate practices in which labor is visible, shared, and valued—and in which the finished object reflects not only what the class made, but how the class learned to make together.”

“Traditional quilters from many different communities use the craft as a way to share and collect knowledge,” Smith adds. “Our class asks how we can make work together as people with different life experiences and how we can communicate and negotiate differences.”

The class heard from visiting artists, including alums  Hera Ford 20 TX, Cassie McGettigan MFA 18 TX, and Zoë Pulley MFA 23 GD, as well as Stephanie Santana and Carina Yepez and studied quilts on view at the RISD Museum, including pieces by Sally Bennett Jones and Ruth Pettway Mosely. “There are countless approaches,” Smith notes, “but we are uplifting and centering the experiences and ways of making learned from Black and Indigenous people and other people of color.”

Image

By the end of October, the class was collaborating on a large quilt incorporating patches made by the students using the different methods they’d learned. They began by laying the material out on a large table and then walked slowly around the perimeter before deciding collectively how to rearrange the pieces.

“It’s interesting to see the same fabrics again and again but used so differently in each piece,” Smith noted. Callahan appreciated the way students experimented with and blended different techniques. “This one looks like an oil slick on pavement,” one student commented.

“Our class asks how we can make work together as people with different life experiences and how we can communicate and negotiate differences.”

Co-instructor Siena Smith

Students took turns facilitating the group’s actions, rearranging the squares first by quilting technique, then by color, and finally landing on a more balanced approach that mixed up the concepts and created a nice overall shape. Callahan and Smith encouraged them to think about the process of collaboration and recognize that everyone doesn’t have to contribute in the exact same way.

As the end of the semester approaches, the class will complete their collaborative quilt and create individual final projects responding to the ethos, intelligence, values, questions, and possibilities of quilting. “Quilting is a practice shaped by access to materials, tools, time, knowledge, space, and opportunity,” the co-instructors note. “We’re working together to consider accessibility not only as a practical concern, but as a social and political condition.”

Simone Solondz / photos by Kaylee Pugliese
November 9, 2026