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.
Quilting as Citation: Witnessing Through Material
abstract / details about the lecture forthcoming
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 annual Ruth Ketterer Harris Lecture will take place at 5:00 pm in the Michael Axelrod Collaborative Learning Hall. The lecture will also be live streamed via Zoom and recorded.
