Artwork Details
- Title
- Bloody Sunday
- Artist
- Date
- 2020
- Location
- Dimensions
- 49 3⁄8 × 49 1⁄4 in. (125.4 × 125.1 cm)
- Credit Line
- Gift of Fleur S. Bresler
- Mediums
- Mediums Description
- cotton fabric and cotton batt
- Classifications
- Subjects
- Landscape — Alabama — Selma
- African American
- Figure group
- Figure — fragment — face
- History — United States — Civil Rights Movement
- Occupation — other — reformer
- Object Number
- 2023.40.8
Artwork Description
Sharon Kerry Harlan
born 1951, Miami, FL; resides Hollywood, FL
Bloody Sunday
2020
Cotton fabric and cotton batting
This quilt by Sharon Kerry Harlan connects to the artist’s consciousness of the Southern Freedom Movement as a high school student in Louisiana. Harlan recalls how on March 7, 1965, a group of community organizers, community members, and religious leaders marched to protest the killing of activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by an Alabama state trooper. The march was led by John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Reverend Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The group of nearly six hundred marchers committed to nonviolence even after they were met with violence from state and local police as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The day became known as Bloody Sunday.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Fleur S. Bresler, 2023.40s.8
We Gather at the Edge: Contemporary Quilts of Black Women Artists, 2025