Dead Rapper Quilts

Part of me is tired of seeing our dearly departed rappers canonized. Then there's another part of me that's jealous I didn't do this first. Could you imagine having a J Dilla quilt as a kid? Dope. The artist/designer's name is Anne Brenneke. Video translation below.

Visiting Anne Brenneke’s Studio Who is pictured on this quilt? “This is Notorious B.I.G. He always wore these coogi sweaters. Obviously this isn’t an original coogi sweater, nobody can afford that. I always thought the sweaters looked really nice, and I tried to recreate them in my own way.” From what materials do you make your Quilts? “Usually I work with t-shirts, they are my foundation, and I try to develop different things out of them. I mostly just use used t-shirts, I like their aesthetics.” (Talking about the Dilla Quilt) “This is my largest piece. It is the most intricate one. Its a J Dilla album Cover from his album Welcome to Detroit. Parts of it are really thick, here for example there are 7 layers.” Do you create all the Quilts by hand? “Yea that’s all done by hand, completly. These layers are sewn on top of each other by hand. If you look at the back the stitch goes trough a layer of cotton and then into this jersey material.” Whats you first work step? “I take a black & white picture, seperate it into different layers. I assign numbers to each colour I’m using and write the numbers on the picture. Then I just sew according to that layout.” “This is Eazy-E, it was the first quilt I made. It was still relativley simple with the colours, I was still learning how to do it, how to layer it etc. I still used really small stitches back then.” Where does the love for American Hip Hop culture come from? “Tv and everything. It was just all so much cooler than anything that we knew. Looking back on it now you can see it more critical, but back then….”