No Childhood Permitted was created in response to a call for entry for SAQA’s Text Messages exhibition. At that time, Patricia Kennedy-Zafred was working on a series of quilts based on photographic images taken by Lewis W. Hine from the early 1900’s. Hine traveled the country, secretly taking photographs of children at work – in the mines, in the fields, the cotton mills, and the oyster canneries. He discovered Rosie Berdych in 1911, and photographed her at work and outside of the oyster cannery in Bluffton, North Carolina. Kennedy-Zafred was captivated by her image, and those of the other little girls he photographed during that time. The result was three separate quilts; No Childhood Permitted was the second piece. The first quilt, Seaside: The Girls of the Canneries, was created in 2011, when I first began to use silk screened images as a major component of my work.

Techniques: machine pieced and quilted, hand silkscreen images, hand dyed fabrics
Culture: American
Geographic Location: North America, Pennsylvania
Credit Line: Gift of Roberta Horton