Wrapped in Love (2025)
Project: Community Arts & Dialogue Project
Role: Lead Artist, Producer, Facilitator, Performer
Location: multiple Boston sites, including Roxbury YMCA, UUM First Church in Roxbury, Roxbury Open Streets (City of Boston public activation event)
Audience: over 200 Boston residents engaged with the project, including youth collaborators, volunteer, public participants and audience members
Partners: Neighborhood Birth Center (primary client);
6 community organization/businesses (Sisters Unchained, Vital CxNs, Union Capital Boston, Roxbury YMCA, UUM First Church Roxbury, Dudley Cafe);
5 individual artists, midwife, and organizers including textile artist L’Merchie Frazier, poet/artist Zahirah Nur Truth, elder midwife Dr. Jo-Anna Rorie, community organizer Nayomi Santiago, photographer Stefanie Belnavis.
Funded by the City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, Neighborhood and Downtown Activation grant.
Synopsis:
Shaw Pong created and led the “Wrapped in Love” project, a 10-month collaboration created in partnership with Neighborhood Birth Center. The project brought together artists, midwife, organizers, youth leaders, community members, and 6 community partner organizations to collaboratively uplift community-held birth and mobilize support to build Boston’s first birth center.
The project created a series of 7 community arts-dialogue events centered on joy, community-held birth, and quilt-making. It also commissioned artist L’Merchie Frazier to design and create a large-scale community quilt, which contains contributions from over 100 community members. The quilt will be displayed in the birth center when it opens.
Events included volunteer fabric prep party, youth workshops, public space activations, and indoor community gatherings with music, storytelling, quilting and community dialogue.
1. Volunteer Fabric Cutting & Ironing Bee
Volunteers helped cut, iron and create templates for upcoming neighborhood quilting events, April 2025
2. “Birth Joy” Community Art-Dialogue Event
Food, birth stories, live music, quilting and music stations, co-hosted by Union Capital Boston and Vital CxNs, April 2025
3. “What Brings You Joy?” Public Space Activations
Engaging public dialogue and artmaking in Nubian Square & Roxbury Open Streets
with Sisters’ Unchained youth leaders, July 2025
4. “Wrapped in Love” Community Dialogue and Quilting event
Community celebration of joy and birth with food, live music, birth stories & quilting July 2025
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5. Quilt Unveiling Reception
Celebration of L’Merchie Frazier’s masterwork quilt, interweaving community contributions of over 100 participants with Frazier’s artwork, December 2025
