Currently at the Memorial & Museum
Preserving History...
Museum Artifacts Tell a Story
March 21, 2011
In the aftermath of the April 19, 1995, bombing, people from all over the country and around the world wanted to help Oklahoma City in any way they could. After hearing author Robin Jones interviewed on Songtime Radio regarding her book, Where Was God at 9:02 A.M.?, Marci McGurr was moved to create this enormous 144" x 114" quilt. According to McGurr, the quilt’s purpose was to let the people of Oklahoma City know that quilters cared. She wanted to express the loss through fragile cloth and threads that were as perishable and interwoven as the lives lost in the bombing. She also wanted to acknowledge that Americans comfort one another when grief strikes, that we pray, and we remember our slain, both at home and abroad.
The center of the quilt depicts the Murrah Building through the use of newspaper clippings. The six different bows represent the bows/ribbons worn at the time of the tragedy. The eight story blocks on either side of the quilt represent individual interpretations of stories or pictures from the book, and the border contains the faces of the 168 people killed in the bombing.
The quilt was made by Marci McGurr and the Bee Friends Quilt Guild in 1996 and donated to the Museum in 2002.
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