Because Martin Luther King was the clear leader for the middle school students in terms of inspiration, I decided to do something different and feature TWO views. This also helps with the “what to do with the legs” thing…. what attracts us as humans is the face (and perhaps the upper body/torso)…. we want to see the features and expression on the faces. A bunch of complete body shapes on a quilt would either look like a drawing class sketchbook page or a display of Barbie dolls. By focusing on the faces and gestures for some of the figures, I can draw the viewer in.
As well, some photos and images become iconic. The “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington in 1963 is one of t hose images…who doesn’t instantly recognize King, his arm extended toward the mass of humanity crowding every open space on the Mall in Washington between the Lincoln Memorial, the location of the podium from which he spoke, to the Washington Monument in the distance. So I added this view:

Years ago, I remember seeing a quilt of a baseball player with the stands in the distance. The quilter (this was in the early 80s when prints were very “calico” and floral) had used a few small sprigged prints, with the size of the flowers/dots decreasing as you got higher up in the stands. Remembering that, I used three different floral prints for the crowd, with the smallest dots ones near the base of the Wash. Monument, the larger ones in the front. Then, because it looked like a field of flowers, I took flesh-toned paints to paint dots onto the print to represent the faces.
Here is how the piece looks so far…..two people down, four to go….
