Artist Carmen Abelleira painted The Seamstress in the weeks following Hurricane Katrina, a deluge that told the future.

“She painted The Seamstress to honor the work of the women of color who were navigating the waters and stitching life back together. The people who figure out what it takes to stop the harm, harness craft, repair the rips, and stay focused on creating anew, even when working with scraps. The people who assert the place of beauty and practice in the family of things, attentive all the while to the storm. The people whose actions call us into right relationship with our wanted obligation to make shelter from the storm for us all...

In the painting, though, it was still 2005. The seamstress had not yet acquiesced to a future in which our world is at the mercy of ever increasingly violent storms. I wanted to intervene. Yes, I wanted to learn how to keep my hands steady like the seamstress even as I stayed attentive to the storm. Yes, I wanted to learn how to read the waters. But more—I wanted us collectively to remember how to inhabit the voice of the waters so that we might possibly take aim at transforming the source and course of the storm itself." -- Abby Reyes, Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice, page 208

Abby convenes The Seamstress Project to advance this work. The Seamstress Project is fiscally-sponsored by the Movement Strategy Center.