Passion for peace drives quilt making: Former Shelter Island teacher uses art to deliver messages

Quilting is personal to Roberta Weiskott Garris, likely because her quilts are more than beautiful works of art.

When AIDS was ravaging the gay community, she created a quilt representing those losing their lives to the dreaded disease in a world that feared and ostracized those early victims. There was  little understanding of how people were contracting the illness, so many shunned those around them who were ill and dying.

More recently, Ms. Garris — a teacher who in 2016 retired after 33 years — the first five in the Mattituck-Cutchogue School District and the balance on Shelter Island — was deeply shocked by the killing on Oct. 7, 2023 of some 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping of 250 Jewish people in Israel by Hamas, a Palestinian militant group.

She initially thought most would be young, but said she was surprised to learn that every age group was represented among the dead and captured.

“This is gut wrenching,” Ms. Garris said of the attack and hostages, some of whom are still being held.  

She deplores the violence on both sides that perpetuates such hatred. “Israel has to exist, but so do the Palestinians,” she said, adding that’s what inspired her last May to create the “Hostage Prayer Quilt.”

Rabbi Gadi Capela of Greenport’s Congregation Tifereth Israel is seeking an arrangement for the Hostage Prayer Quilt to be displayed at the Jewish Theological Seminary based in New York City.

A friend and fellow Greenporter, Tim Mueller, describes the quilt as “an upbeat/inspirational representation of the tragic loss of lives.” That loss of lives and hostages taken had to be quantified, Ms. Garris said, explaining the painstaking work that informed her design.

A convert to Judaism, she was raised in a Greek household identifying as a Protestant, although neither she nor her Jewish husband Jack Weiskott practiced their religions. But in exploring a congregation where her firstborn son Eric could learn about his Jewish roots, she found herself drawn to Judaism and a home at the village’s Congregation Tifereth Israel.

The passion for quilting goes back many years to a quilt she began for her younger son, Carl, but never finished. It remained unfinished until she retired from teaching. She thought she might spend some of her down time resuming the almost long-forgotten hobby.

Then a friend invited her to attend a quilters meeting in Southold, and she reluctantly agreed, anticipating a room of women sitting around chatting and quilting. That’s not what she found.

No one was quilting, but the group was listening to a speaker talk about the craft. That day and in sessions that followed, she found her early hobby was transforming itself into a commitment that would lead her to embrace a world of creativity. She not only creates her own quilts, but displays them at many prestigious shows, captivating audiences at venues with her stories about what inspired her to develop quilts with meanings beyond their beauty.

She also works a day a week at a quilting store in Riverhead, where she was offered more hours, but declined, wanting less structure to her schedule. As it is, she assists her husband in his landscaping business as it gets busy with the arrival of warm weather.

As with the quilts she created during the AIDS crisis and in the wake of the violence in Israel and Gaza, many of her pieces are personal, including one as a tribute to her life in Greenport with 365 individual squares representing weather changes day to day.

In a sense, quilting is a return to the early days when she thought she would pursue a career as an art educator with degrees in fine arts and art history. But she was further pulled by earlier motivations — her admiration for her mother, a former librarian turned teacher, and memories of her grandfather, who couldn’t read and her wish that she had had the skills to teach him.

Her training came too late for him, but came alive as she took an elective reading course while gaining her credentials in special education.

She fell in love with teaching, especially with the neediest students.

Asked if her quilts are for sale, Ms. Garris said she couldn’t imagine putting a price on them, trying to figure out the hours of research, fabric choices, development of designs, cutting and quilting, and the special moments and emotions she has creating them.