so what aM I doing, anyway?

At a recent event in Montana, someone asked whether the project had changed any minds. I replied with the vaguely defensive response I have said, mainly to myself, before: Nobody who makes a point of viewing this project—in person, on Instagram, via the website—will have an open mind about the topic. I am preaching to the choir. I also replied that what keeps me going is the idea that I am making an archive. I am a historian with a needle. I am recording these stories so that no one in the future can ever deny what happened because Roe was overturned. But my recent reading of essays by the stunning Rebecca Solnit has enlarged and complicated my sense of the role of this project in the fight for abortion rights. She argues, essentially, that change is complex. There are not simple, identifiable causes that lead to clear effects. Change comes in fits and starts, in backslides and backlashes. It leapfrogs across time and place. She invokes the proverbial image of the butterfly that flaps its wings on one side of the globe and changes the weather on the other. That lack of predictability is reason for hope, not despair. “You just never know” can be a sustaining mantra, not a defeated shrug. Maybe a college student who saw the show in March was so moved they go to law school and, in twenty years, will argue against an abortion ban in court. Maybe someone sends the print book to a relative in Texas, who shares it with a cousin who had no idea women were dying, and, in the voting booth, can’t forget the story of Porsha Ngumezi’s little boys looking for their mother. Maybe someone examines the website and thinks: I could make feminist art, too. You never know.

Designed and stitched by Sarah McCabe