Welcome Blanket at Smart Museum (and some nifty cataloguing)

The Smart Museum in Chicago is having what is described as an artistic action.

On the museum website it says:
Welcome Blanket is a crowd-sourced artistic action that calls for over 3,000 blankets to be knit from 3,500,640 yards of yarn, a length equal to the proposed border wall dividing the United States and Mexico. Welcome Blanket invites participants to knit, crochet, or sew the blankets for new immigrants as well as for refugees seeking resettlement and send them with personal notes of welcome and stories of immigration to the Smart Museum of Art.


You can read more about it on the museum blog.

You can see the catalogue in this image from Instagram, and you can see the online catalogue by scrolling down at this link.

Now you can scroll through the Welcome Blanket catalogue!! You can check it out both on the Smart's and our websites. Thank you @smartmuseum for making this happen 💕🗽💕 ・・・ New #welcomeblanket tool: a digital catalogue of blankets! On the @welcomeblanket exhibition page on our website, you can now scroll through images and other details about the blankets we have opened and documented so far. We still have many, many more boxes to open and blankets to catalogue. You can help! Join in one of our unpacking parties, held every Saturday from 1–4pm.

A post shared by Welcome Blanket (@welcomeblanket) on Sep 13, 2017 at 4:52pm PDT

You can see how people are sharing their #welcomeblanket photographs. 


This is an impressive collaboration, and I really like how quickly the museum is cataloguing the material, as the catalogue keeps changing and being updated.  I figure this is part of the whole art experience, but this is an art experience with practical outcomes.  I had a look at the representation on Instagram of #wrapwithlove as I thought aspects of #welcomeblanket sounded similar to Wrap with love.

A key difference is the documentation and cataloguing. I have not found a library which photographs each wrap and includes the photograph in the local studies collection.  If anyone knows of this happening, I would be very interested to hear. I really like the #welcomeblanket for what is doing as an 'artistic action', and I really like the way the Smart Museum is cataloging all the wraps.