BIOQUILTS

by Corinne Okada Takara

Community Collaborative Biogrown Quilts/Elevating diverse community voices in the storytelling, materials exploration, and questions driving the future of sustainable biodesign

Quilts speak to place, culture, and community, and biology and biomaterials do, too. By blending quilt making and biomaking with locally sourced cultural materials in community-grown biotextiles, BioQuilts explores ways to engage people beyond academia and science circles–people who are currently excluded from the conversation–in talking about the future of sustainability design and biodesign. The BioQuilts project blends the familiar with the foreign by framing a biomaterial experiment as a communal quilt exploration that is approachable, fun, and homey. This project aims to grow a culture of public literacy, inclusion, and ownership equity in The workshops, conducted in community gardens and parking lots, engaged multigenerational groups of local community members from the cultural neighborhoods of Japantown, Little Saigon and the Latine community of Mayfair and downtown San Jose, California. It was a collaboration between artist Corinne Okada Takara and the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles in partnership with Chopsticks Alley, the Japanese American Museum of San Jose, and Veggielution. https://bioquilts.weebly.com/

Corinne Takara

Corinne Takara is a San Jose Area artist/STEAM educator who creates workshops that elevate and empower community voices in conversations centered on identity, science, and technology. She is the Program Director of Xinampa community biolab and the co-founder of BioJam Camp. She has led four youth teams in the Biodesign Challenge, is a 2020 Global Community Biosummit Fellow, and a 2020 National Public Interest Technology Innovation Fellow. She grew up shaped by her dad’s stories of his childhood on a Maui plantation and is fascinated by the power of ancestral knowledge and storytelling in shaping the future of bio-innovation.