The Sewing Room celebrates domestic spaces that nurture creativity, community, and craft. Part textile installation, part material and community dialogue, this project merges the experiences of making, showing, and talking about art.

Artist Carolyn Hazel Drake has long credited time spent in her mother’s quilt store as foundational to her own artistic practice; here, she centers the continued role of making as a source of emotional connection between her late grandmother, mother and grown daughter. Drake extends the legacy of four generations of spare bedrooms, walk-in closets, and garages repurposed as sewing rooms to Hide & Seek Gallery, itself a space of fluid purposes and identity.

In July, Drake will install new work featuring hand-dyed and altered traditional patchwork and applique designs reflecting these familial connections and highlighting the sustaining power of intergenerational making. The exhibition will culminate in a sewing circle and public reception on Saturday, July 20, where Drake, her mother Betty Anderson, and daughter Sylvia Eden will invite guests to join in hand-stitching and embroidering simple patchwork squares and in sharing tea. Through blurring distinctions between domestic objects and spaces and the culturally elevated spheres of the art studio and gallery, Drake invites viewers to see a creative practice existing in a gentler context that is no less energetically charged by the power of matrilineal kinship.

An exhibition catalog will provide documentation of the artworks, recollections, and conversations, and an essay by local writer Jules Ohman, alongside creative reflections and prompts for readers to engage in on their own. Funding for the catalog is generously supported by the Regional Arts & Culture Council.