Ruth Ketterer Harris Lecture 2025: Quilting as Citation: Witnessing Through Material

Since 1990, the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection has proudly sponsored the annual Ruth Ketterer Harris Lecture series in honor of Ruth Ketterer Harris, the collection’s first curator. We are thrilled to share Dr. Sharbreon Plummer, artist and public scholar, will be the 2025 lecturer.

In her talk, Dr. Sharbreon Plummer explores how quilts act as both record and methodology–a material archive through which Black women have documented the contours of their lived experience and theorized about the world around them. Bridging together the voices of writers, artists and researchers, this lecture asks us to consider how quilting can be a mode of citation—an intentional practice of acknowledgement, lineage shaping and care that transcends the hierarchies of traditional scholarship. By engaging examples from historic and contemporary makers, Dr. Plummer invites us to see the quilt not just as an aesthetic object, but as a site of relational knowledge. In thinking with and through the quilt, she illuminates how material culture can expand our understanding of research, personal narrative and place. Together, we will explore how we can witness and be witnessed in ways that exceed the written word.

About the lecturer: Sharbreon Plummer, Ph.D. has spent the past fifteen years working at the intersections of nonprofit management, arts and culture, community engagement and project/program management. Her professional journey has prioritized cultivating resources and programs for communities of creators of the global majority, particularly those in the South, whose work advances freedom, liberation and social change. Her research and artistic practice have been shaped by her investigations into Black art history and cultural studies, craft and material studies, southern folkways and her lived experience as a native of South Louisiana.

As an artist and public scholar, Dr. Plummer has facilitated and presented work at/through institutions such as Project Row Houses, Princeton University, Rhode Island School of Design, Americans for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, among several others. A few of her creative projects include her internationally distributed zine Diasporic Threads: Black Women, Fibre and Textiles (2022) and curatorial projects such as Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South (2025), Stitching Abolition (2022) and Mirrored Migrations (2017). She has also been featured as an artist-in-residence at Rogers Art Loft (Las Vegas, NV) and Arquetopia (Oaxaca, MX). Dr. Plummer is a staff writer for Quiltfolk Magazine and a member of Art Hx, a collaborative research and engagement platform that centers artistic practice to explore the convergences of health,colonial legacies and practices of radical care. Her forthcoming publication, Stories in the Seams, is slated for release in 2026 by Chronicle Books.

The Ruth Ketterer Harris Lecture is made possible by the generosity of Kathleen “Katie” Orea Sweeney and the Ruth Ketterer Harris Memorial Lectureship Fund.