On May 9th 1972 the Reverend Jesse Jackson appeared on Sesame Street and led the kids through a simple call and response. With each refrain he affirmed the value of their difference. “I am—Somebody” he said, and the kids repeated in unison. “…I may be small, but I am—Somebody! I may have made mistakes, but I am—Somebody! My clothes are different, My face is different, My hair is different, But I am—Somebody!... Alongside the growth of civil rights movements and the Black power movement of the 1970s was a cultural push for Black self-determination. Over a half century later, as artists and cultural practitioners continue to find new and better ways to value Black life, the message is still being shared. 

Haitian-Canadian interdisciplinary textile artist Stina Baudin has created a monumental public work to honor the historical presence of Black people in the Eastern Townships. The Sky Still Carries the Stories is an expansive quilt applique that covers the entirety of the Adelard barn roof. Quilted panels of black and blue tarp, waxed cotton, dip-died indigo strips, and denim are hand-sown and inlaid with mirrors. An accompanying soundscape by Markus Floats mixes names and numbers and fragments of poetry with the ambient sound of chimes and bells. 

Not so long ago, and not so far away, in St-Armand-Philipsburg, teacher Hank Avery worked tirelessly to have a parcel of unmarked graves of Black people, found on private property, properly commemorated. Here in Adelard, another commemoration is taking place through Stina’s creative research. As an artist, she has been interested in how things are laid out in the archive, and how they are accounted for. This has shifted her away from a “finding truth” method of research since, with regards to Black history in Canada, information is sometimes inaccessible or unknowable. For instance, what were the names of those people who were left to eternal rest on private property? We still don’t know. Confronting the absence of recorded Black history, the artist took a different new approach. She crafted a work whose forms give shape to a local story of Black life.  

Across its surface, sun and moon kiss mirrors, and as they twinkle and shine the work becomes cacophonous. Stars have always been a sky map, a method of wayfinding for navigating towards other, hopefully better geographies. The mirrors, like stars, pulse light that emulates a celestial guiding presence. That light, refracted from above, feels ancestral. 

It has been estimated that in the 1830s, over 200 Black people lived in the region. The Adelard barn dates back to this era—a time when local Black farm workers represented a significant portion of the area’s rural communities. The Sky Still Carries the Stories is a landmark for their unrecorded history. It covers the barn in a massive quilt as if to protect a sacred place, and in this way the work honours a local past and testifies to a long standing Black presence in Frelighsburg, and the Eastern Townships more broadly. 

Stina often works with abstraction. Here, with the barn roof as her blank canvas, she undertook the largest textile project she’s ever attempted, at 400 inches wide and 464 inches tall. Each panel is 2 or 4 inches in width and 55-80 inches long. She made over one thousand four hundred panels to cover the roof, and each handstitched piece took up to an hour to complete. The labour Stina put into this project was a tribute. The days and weeks and months she spent carefully collecting materials, planning the quilt and cutting and dying and sowing together the sections, this labour itself was how she found she could honour the lives of the Black people who had been here. In other words, the historical Black labour connected to this site is mirrored in Stina’s work, and if you hold that effort in your heart, you can feel it throughout your body as you listen to the voices and watch the light shine down from above.

COTTON is important to Black history (duh!).

WAXED CLOTH is an African tradition, and also functionally water proof.

QUILTS are used for protection: they provide warmth and they can be coded with information.

BLACK and BLUE is like the colour of the sky, and of Blackness itself.

STARS represent the endless possibilities of Black people, those recorded in official histories, as well as those outside of them.

SOUNDSCAPE, in this work, is a collectivity of Black voices including adults and children and even the artist’s own voice. This chorus echoes the stories we pass on that carry our pasts, and the collectivity of the stars, and the collectivity of Black people who may have worked, laughed, slept, cooked, ate and sang together at this barn.