Quilts, Grandmothers, & Black Ecologies: Intuitive Sewing Circle (Eco Afro Futures Workshop)

​This event is part of Eco Afro Futures.

​Workshop Description: This workshop explores slow craft as a regenerative technology rooted in Black Southern feminist healing traditions and ecological knowledge — offering an alternative to logics of speed, extraction, and endless growth. Participants are invited to slow down through reflection and a small-scale intuitive sewing exercise using reclaimed materials, exploring practices of sustainability, creativity, and care while drawing lessons from craft histories and the natural world. Together, we will consider how small acts like quilt stitches and plant ecologies scale through interdependence to shape more connected climate futures.

​About the workshop Lead: Carey J. Flack is a creative technologist, writer, archivist, and educator based in Oakland, California, with roots 40 miles southeast of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work focuses on enduring Black Southern memory and aesthetics — expressed through archival research, courses, and art that explore Black ecologies, place-making, embodied memory, and slow craft.

​As the archivist behind @pressed.roots, she documents Black land/plant histories across the American South, with a focus on healing the ecological impacts of slavery; this practice extends into MEMORY PATTERN, a four-week quilting course she co-directs, exploring Black textile histories across the global diaspora and connecting participants across the U.S. and Canada. She is also the researcher behind Mapping Black Oklahoma, a community GIS project highlighting Black and Afro-Indigenous spatial memory in Oklahoma. 

​Carey has taught at the School for Poetic Computation and was featured in Seventeen Magazine as a “Power Girl” for her work in technology. She’s given talks at the United Nations, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and New York University.