National Grant, Local Impact
In December 2021, the Vermillion Cultural Association in partnership with lead artist Ariadne Albright of Creative Care, LLC, was awarded $75,000 to harness the power of the arts to build confidence in COVID-19 vaccine. The CDC Foundation awarded grants to a total of 30 organizations across the country to create work that inspires people to get vaccinated by providing accurate information about the COVID-19 vaccines in creative, engaging ways. VCA/Creative Care’s project was the sole South Dakota grantee. Arts and culture are crucial tools in public health communication, and the VCA/Creative Care team was excited to employ artists in service to the important cause of community health and safety.
Our undertaking, titled the Barn Quilt Project: South Dakota Strong, sought to connect the familiar traditions of quilting and barn quilts with stories of comfort and resilience from the COVID-19 pandemic. Quilt making is a cross-cultural tradition in South Dakota that represents home, family, comfort, and history. And wooden, painted barn quilts dot the South Dakota landscape, telling stories about individual farms, historical events, or communities while also adding visual interest to the countryside and increasing rural tourism.
Nine patches for nine communities. Homesteaders in South Dakota favored this design for its simplicity and thriftiness.
Arts on the go
The Barn Quilt Project artists visited Lemmon, Buffalo, and Belle Fourche in February; Hot Springs, Martin, and Pine Ridge in March; and Chamberlain, Watertown, and Vermillion in April. Participants at the arts events each created their own 9-patch barn quilt square out of brightly colored fine art papers. They could follow one of five provided traditional quilt square patterns or invent their own design. Using one of five writing prompts, folks were encouraged to share some reflections on the COVID pandemic inside their quilt square. Questions included “What do you think is the most important thing you’ve learned from your pandemic experience?” and “Who helped you most during the pandemic? Who did you help?”
The Barn Quilt Project engaged over 500 people. And of those, over 200 submitted their barn quilt squares for use in the culminating exhibition, Common Thread, held in the VCA’s Coyote Gallery in April. For the reception, the team also gave a capstone presentation, Common Thread: The Barn Quilt Project Wrap-Up, in the Coyote Twin Theater. You can watch the panel discussion on YouTube.
Common Thread reception attendees read the reflections of a Barn Quilt Project participant who donated their paper quilts to the exhibition. Participants chose from hundreds of brightly colored 3x3 paper squares to create their patches. Although the quilt designs are traditional, the paper patterns and colors have modern appeal. Lead artist Albright mailed the quilt squares back to their makers at the end of the exhibition.
This slide from the Common Thread wrap-up shows the increases of vaccinations in the communities the Barn Quilt Project visited from the time we applied for the grant in October 2021 to the time the project completed in April 2022. Although we can’t claim BQP was the cause of the increase (the more infectious Delta variant emerged during that period, which itself caused an uptick in vaccinations), our visiting artists who modeled safety practices, provided a safe place for discussion, and shared CDC information didn’t hurt!
Trusted Messengers: A LEGACY
In summer 2022, the David J. Sencer CDC Museum at CDC headquarters in Atlanta invited VCA and Creative Care to submit materials from the Barn Quilt Project for an exhibition recognizing the vaccine confidence grant, as this was a first-of-its-kind, arts-in-health national grant collaboration between the CDC Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. Of the 30 grantees, just five were selected for the exhibition. From November 2022 through August 2023, paper quilts, our specially designed wellness materials, and photos from across the nine communities were on display as part of Trusted Messengers: Building Confidence in COVID-19 Vaccines Through Art.
At the conclusion of the grant period, the CDC Foundation announced that the novel approach of arts response to a increasing community confidence in vaccination was determined successful and future government health campaigns will seek to include an arts in health dimension. As a result, the Barn Quilt Project was invited to add its materials to the Arts Response Repository and Field Guides, an open-access resource database designed to highlight and enable impactful arts and culture-based programs that promote vaccine confidence and demand. Built through a collaboration between the University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine and the CDC, the repository aims to drive partnerships and programming at the intersection of public health and arts and culture.
The Barn Quilt Project on display as part of the Trusted Messengers exhibition in the CDC Museum in Atlanta, GA. Featured on the wall is a BQP logo translated into Lakota, a sample writing prompt, and a selection of quilt squares. In the documents box are a selection of event flyers, glue sticks and fine art paper squares, a quilt pattern, BQP wellness materials in English and Spanish, and a Common Thread program.
Funding Statement
Funding for this effort was made possible through a subaward from the CDC Foundation and was part of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) financial assistance award totaling $75,000 with 100 percent funding from CDC/HHS. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement by, CDC/HHS or the U.S. Government.