6:01 pm until 7:05 pm, April 4, 1968, from the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee (looking in the direction the shots were fired), from the series As the Stars Go By

One hour that shaped the American experience is charted here through the procession of stars moving across the sky. This movement represents the passage of time from the moment that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot, in the early evening of April 4, 1968, until the time he was pronounced dead. This work visualizes the arc of the stars as they would have appeared had they not been obscured by the sun. Encapsulating several levels of human perception, this hand-stitched quilt invites us to contemplate how we relate to shared historical experiences.

From 1957 to 1965, Dr. King visited Oberlin several times. His last visit was during the college’s Commencement ceremony on June 14, 1965, at which he was awarded an honorary degree of humane letters and delivered a commencement address titled “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” This speech had a powerful impact on the graduates in the Class of 1965, including the donors of this work.

This quilt was created as part of the artist’s series As Stars Go By, which examines moments of violence from throughout American history that dramatically altered the future of the country. Other events illustrated in the series include the Battle of Wounded Knee, Battle of the Bulge, Hiroshima, and the September 11 attacks. Von Mertens visualizes these acts as pivot points, not only in historical terms, but also in scientific terms, as she depicts the star rotation patterns above these moments in time. Toward the right-hand side of the quilt, one can see the North Star, Polaris, as it barely moves in the sky (being just one degree off the celestial North Pole). The other stars chart longer paths because they are further removed from the Earth’s axis of rotation. During the 64-minute time frame captured here, the stars had moved approximately 15 degrees across the sky. Von Mertens’ stitch-work is faithful to the stars’ movement and apparent colors, from blue to whitish-yellow to orange, which reflect their temperatures and star types. Through its physical size and metaphorical scale, the work captures an almost vertiginous sense of motion and proportion.

While utilizing computers to research and design her quilts, Von Mertens still completes her work using traditional stitching techniques. As she notes, “The hand-stitched line is an important element in my work. The evidence of the hand evokes time and contemplation, almost as a commitment to the ideas contained within the work...The hand-stitched line acts as a tracing—as if my fingers were slowly tracing the pathways that I am stitching as a way to map them and as a way to understand them.” All of her works are made to fit a single- or a queen-sized bed and are often shown in that form. While Von Mertens’s subject matter stimulates deep reflection, the ultra-traditionalist methods she employs to create her quilts also suggest notions of comfort and domesticity.