Since 2017 Hinda Mandell has honored the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Sewing Society, a group of 19 women who banded together in 1851 to support the work of Fredrick Douglas. She has organized yarn installations at numerous Rochester parking lots that hold direct, historic connections to the group such as: 297 Alexander Street where the group would gather to do handcraft and the site of the first Douglas family home, and Corinthian Street, as Corinthian Hall was the site where the group held holiday bazaars. During her residency Mandell will be chronicling, through bookmaking, the contemporary parking-lot yarn installations and their impact.

Hinda Mandell is an associate professor in the School of Communication, RIT, editor of Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), co-curator/editor of Crafting Democracy: Fiber Arts and Activism (RIT Press, 2019), and co-editor of Nasty Women and Bad Hombres (University of Rochester Press, 2018). In August 2019 she led a “craft intervention” (as part of Current Seen). The crowd-sourced effort received 400 swatches from across U.S.

Hinda Mandell’s residency was cancelled due to Covid 19. VSW Press worked with Mandell to produce a publication related to her project Abolitionist Parking Lots in 2021.

Funds for this residency came from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; the Max and Marian Farash Foundation; and Joy of Giving Something.