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Borrowing from the Jewish tradition of the tallit in which a garment is given to prepare or cover a person during prayer, the Protestant tradition of prayer shawls are a way to transmit prayer to the recipient as a gesture of love, comfort, and protection. Join Connor Walden in a participatory ceremony as he distributes five community knitted prayer shawls, currently on view as part of the 2019 University of Washington MFA + MDES Thesis Exhibition. This final communal act aims to facilitate an interfaith dialogue through music, prayer, conversation, and congregation. Collectively and individually, the prayer shawls will be blessed as we prepare them to be dispatched to the respective communities they are honoring.

Each prayer shawl consists of stitched-together knit and crocheted squares and rectangles that were made specifically for communities who survived mass shootings. People from across the world (including Seattle, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Texas, Oregon, Utah, Mexico, and Great Britain) constituted an intergenerational network that participated in this communal act of creation through knitting, prayer, and mail.

Connor Walden (b. 1994) is a conceptual artist from Dallas, Texas, who currently lives in Seattle and recently graduated from the University of Washington with an MFA in Three-dimensional Forum (3D4M). Before moving to Seattle, Connor received two degrees from The University of Texas at Austin in Studio Art (BA) and Marketing (BBA). His work focuses on the social and spiritual constructs of belief and its effects on the American political, social, and personal landscapes.