Meet Rachel Wallis, MA

Rachel is a community taught crafter, artist, and activist. Her work focuses on collaborative quilting projects addressing issues of race and social justice. Past projects have included Gone But Not Forgotten, a community quilting process creating a memorial quilt for individuals killed by the Chicago Police Department, and Inheritance: Quilting Across Prison Walls, a project using quilts to help rebuild relationships divided by incarceration. She is currently artist in residence at Project Nia. 

Q+A

What do you know for sure? 

The thing I know for sure is that making, regardless of the outcome, is enough. For as long as I can remember I wanted to be an artist, but I never felt like I was any good at art so I didn't make it. Years ago, I saw Lynda Barry speak at a bar somewhere, and she said something like "You don't make art to get famous, or to make money, or even to get praise. You make art because every day you make art is a day you want to die a little bit less." It really clarified something for me. It didn't matter what kind of kind of art I made or if it was any good. What was important was the act of making. Making was enough. And that really liberated me to become an artist. I've reached a place in my skills and practice where I generally like the things that I make, but I could only reach this point by telling myself that it didn't matter if what I made was garbage, that just the process of making was what made it worth doing. 

What do you do when you feel stuck?

When I feel stuck, I make quilts. I know that is an unexpected answer, but as someone who has experienced some pretty incapacitating periods of depression, quilting has been a really important way to work my way unstuck. Even when I can't imagine making capital A Art or I feel completely uncreative or hopeless about the future there is something really easy and comforting about making a quilt. I can go back to my fabric stash and pull some fabrics and just start building quilt blocks, one after another. There's a lot of repetition, and it doesn't require a lot of higher decision making. You can make impulse decisions about what fabrics look ok together and just not look back. It's incremental, you can work at it in small bites, and have a sense of progress or productivity in your life. And even though it's generally a solo activity, it always makes me feel connected, both to the person I'm making the quilt for and all of the other quilters stretching back through history. Quilting has kept me going through a lot of the darkest periods of my life and kept me making when other creative action seemed impossible. 

Tell us about an epic "first"  

In 2017 I got my first artist residency at A Studio in the Woods in New Orleans, LA. I had been a working artist for a couple of years at that point and had gotten community support for my work and even a fairly substantial grant, but my imposter syndrome always found a way to write that off. It was the issues I was working on, not the quality of my art that was getting support, or that I was just a good organizer and the support I was seeing was about peoples' relationships with me and not about what I was actually doing. The residency was the first time that total strangers had looked at my art and my proposals for future work and decided to invest in it. I got to go stay in an incredible place for 6 weeks and do a community quilting project in a totally new context on a totally new subject and I succeeded based on the value of my ideas and my work. It allowed me to really start believing in myself as an artist, and to stop discounting my work. 

Who helped get you here?  

A couple of years ago I started shifting from calling myself a "self-taught" artist to a community taught artist. It's still important to me that I didn't go to art school (although I did end up getting an arts admin degree in socially engaged art). I really believe in the craft tradition and the values of the skills passed down over the generations outside of fine arts institutions. But as much as I've learned through trial and years of making, I've learned so much more from the people (mostly women) in my community. So many people have taken the time to sit and sew and talk and plan with me. Chicago is full of the most incredible artist/activists, and I learned more about effective and ethical arts activism from the organizers of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Tamms Year Ten, the Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project, and the For the People Arts Collective than I ever learned in grad school. I've learned most of what I know about quilting from older women who have taken the time to sew with me and problem solve and gently correct my poor form. And my life has been transformed by the abolitionist organizers who shaped my understanding of US history, the origins of prisons and policing, and the power of transformative justice. 

How long do you think you would you survive the zombie apocalypse? Why?  

This is complicated, as I have spent *a lot* of time thinking about this! On the one hand I have a lot of opinions about the do's and don'ts of the apocalypse: Do make use of rooftops and elevation to keep yourself safe! Do join up with other survivors to share skills, keep each other safe, and conserve resources! Do figure out where your regional supermarket distribution warehouse is. I've even spent time learning about traditional knowledge like trapping, fire-starting and water filtration. On the other hand, I cannot run more than like a half block without getting winded. And I hate camping and the outdoors. So realistically the answer is probably "not very long." 

Want more? Check out her website www.rachelawallis.com and connect with Rachel on Instagram