A blue stitch for a case.
A red stitch for a death.
At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Boulder-based artist Heather Schulte wanted to turn the case and death tallies into something tangible. She had grown up in Nebraska and had been “embedded in textiles since birth,” she said. As the virus spread, she started a cross-stitching project called “Stitching the Situation” to deal with the isolation and loss that the pandemic sowed.
Schulte began by tracking each day’s case and death counts in the United States, forming intricate designs — primarily of blues, with small blocks of red growing from the corners of the cross-stiched squares. Keen to present the best data for each day of her project, she initially used data from the World Health Organization (WHO), then later switched to the John Hopkins Cornonavirus Resource Center.
She adjusted data sources throughout the pandemic as many trackers changed, shifted, and stopped counting altogether. So far, she’s ended the project with the end of the public health emergency. “But it’s a soft ending,” she said, noting she’s enthusiastic about working on days past the ending of the emergency if collaborators have stories or ideas to stitch. To do so, she’ll find as accurate information as she can based on the available data.
“The first six months are on three individual panels of Aida cloth, which is a type of fabric specifically designed for cross-stitching,” Schulte told me in a phone interview during a windy, snowy day in Colorado. “This project has evolved in tandem and along the same timeline as Covid,” she said. “It went from me alone in my house, to me and my neighbors stitching outside, to larger public cross-stitching sessions while social distancing.”
The project’s April 11, 2020 block is particularly meaningful to Schulte. It is a tribute to her uncle, who tested positive for Covid that day and passed away shortly after on April 13, 2020. The artwork shows the day’s case count: 28,447 and the deaths: 1,844. Below is a cross-stitched portrait of her uncle. He is smiling beneath a ball cap and glasses. “Today, my uncle Joe tested positive,” the panel reads.
Stitching and creating are a quiet and meditative way to grieve, Schulte said: “There’s something about the repetition that helps calm you down. It helps get you out of that kind of fight or flight response, or when we completely freeze.” Working on each panel is a way to process the grief, reflect on the weight of the pandemic day by day, and ultimately commemorate every death and case, as millions of cases would lead to Long Covid. On a broader scale, the project also memorializes the pandemic that has devastated and continues to devastate communities around the world.
Alongside her work on Stitching the Situation, Schulte focused her work on other health crises. This summer she put together an event and sewed flags — another textile project — with The Art Students League of Denver to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Denver Principles. The principles were an important healthcare manifesto written in 1983 by a group of men living with AIDS that revolutionized HIV/AIDS activism and led to person-first language in healthcare that was adopted by other advocates, including in the Long Covid community: “person with Long Covid” (pwLC), or “person with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis” (pwME).
One of the flags she helped make for the project commemorated a banner that the Denver Principles authors unfurled on stage at a gay and lesbian health conference on HIV/AIDS in Denver. It read, “FIGHTING FOR OUR LIVES.”
“I have had my own serious medical experiences,” Schulte told me, explaining her draw to covering health, disability, and chronic illness in her artwork. “I have a chronic condition that I have to manage, that can be debilitating at times,” she said, “Those experiences brought health into high relief for me for me. Especially as I faced mortality at such a young age.”
Later in the spring of 2020, Schulte broke up her Covid project into individual panels so that it could be a more collaborative, collective project. Now, more than 400 people are individually stitching across the United States — and in a few other countries — forming a large, collective art project reminiscent of the AIDS memorial quilt.
Schulte plans for the complete project to include 1,200 to 1,500 panels, and is interested in finding ways to display the artwork in galleries, public spaces, and other locations. Unlike the AIDS memorial quilt, she won’t combine the panels into a larger tapestry because storing and displaying such large pieces of art can be complicated, especially for a project run largely by one person.
Currently, the many panels of the project are stored in her art studio in a flat file cabinet. As the project continues to grow she hopes to partner with a museum or institution that can help store and preserve the artwork.
To increase accessibility, Schulte has found ways for even more people to participate in the memorial, especially since some people with disabilities may not be able to cross-stitch. She has built a network of artists and designers that partner with community members who have been impacted by the pandemic, including many people with Long Covid “These individuals can share their stories,” she said, describing how artists can then transfer their stories into designs — think pictures, portraits, quotes, and more — that can be made into patterns for volunteers to stitch.
who passed away on April 13, 2020. Courtesy of Heather Schulte.
A few panels have been completed by people with Long Covid, while others have been inspired by people living with the disease. Schulte described the story of a local Boulder, Colorado woman who had a severe case of Covid-19 and, more than a year later after the acute infection that hospitalized her, had to have a liver transplant because of the organ damage that Covid-19 had caused. An artist had worked with the woman to tell her story through a design, which volunteers are currently stitching.
“I wanted to make sure that especially the people who have been most deeply impacted by the pandemic can easily share their stories,” Schulte said. Besides stitching or designing, volunteers have also interviewed people about their experiences with the pandemic, including many unhoused community members, and translated their interviews into panels.
“The virus doesn’t just go away,” Schulte said, “It changes and mutates and the project has had to evolve in tandem alongside the pandemic. I wanted to make sure that [Stitching the Situation] wasn’t just something temporary but could be something that could be sustained through these long-term phases. A project that would help us remember.”
The public can get involved with Stitching the Situation by filling out this form on the project’s website. You can also follow along on Instagram and Facebook.
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