Mother Patchwork began as a graphic essay, Jennings’ contribution to the publication, Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch (Yale University Press, 2020). This animation recognizes that the logic of the quilt, which stitches part to part, is also the logic that transforms still into moving image. And like quilting, it is a process that involves many hands. Mother Patchwork is the work of John Jennings with David Brame and Esperanza Bey, stitched together with the sounds of Moon Medicin, and rendered as animation by Daniel Rowe. It is the result of collaboration between Bronx Museum of the Arts and Rivers Institute for Art & Thought.


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John Jennings is a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside. Jennings is co-editor of the Eisner Award-winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of the Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. Jennings is also a 2016 Nasir Jones Hip Hop Studies Fellow with the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. Jennings’ current projects include the horror anthology Box of Bones, the coffee table book Black Comix Returns (with Damian Duffy), and the Eisner-winning, Bram Stoker Award-winning, New York Times best-selling graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s classic dark fantasy novel Kindred. Jennings is also founder and curator of the ABRAMS Megascope line of graphic novels.