Quilting is a vital strand of African American culture, telling vividly complex stories of pain, oppression, freedom, and power. Thanks to a growing body of research across galleries worldwide, the complex and diverse history of African American quilting is becoming more widely understood today than ever before, while the political agency and visual impact of the medium is being embraced by a generation of contemporary makers.
As O.V. puts it: “I do view African-American quilting as a genre, just like traditional quilts, art quilts, modern quilts. Our quilts are just a little bit different.”
Harriet Powers' Bible Quilt, a celebrated example of African American story quilts.
Early Influences and Techniques
In early America quilting was both functional and artistic, forming an essential need for warmth and comfort as much as interior decoration. Research reveals how these highly skilled makers would also make bedding for their own families; fabrics for personal use were scarce but these women were highly resourceful, turning scraps of “throw away” goods such as faded or worn clothing and food sacks into stunningly complex designs. Patterns they developed included Sawtooth, Drunkard’s Path, Railroad Crossing, Tree of Paradise, Ocean Wave, Feathered Star, and Nine Patch.
There is no single unifying style that defines African American quilts - they are as unique and individual as their makers - but certain similarities have been observed by quilt historians over the centuries that are hard to ignore, such as asymmetric designs, large-scale patterns, and wonderfully rich story quilts, to name a few. Made predominantly by women and passed down through the generations since the early days of America, some quilts celebrate and revive the bold patterns of ancient African culture, while others reflect on personal or historical stories of struggle and emancipation.
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In West Africa, women used strip textile weaving, a technique that has since been translated into African American patchwork and appliqué. Patchwork consists of sewing together strips of fabric, while appliqué entails sewing those pieces of fabric together onto a larger background. African American quilts were born by combining traditional African appliqué techniques with conventional European quilting styles.
Historically, the craft of quilting was mainly a domestic task performed by women. It served as a way to provide warmth for families and was a reflection of the household’s economy, with repurposed fabrics pieced together to create a quilt. Before the Civil War, quilting was a communal act for American women, especially Black American women. Born out of necessity, enslaved women created quilts to supplement their sparse bedding.
Blending appliqué with other European styles, Black quilters are primarily responsible for turning the American patchwork quilt into an instrument of storytelling and historical documentation. Additionally, Black artists brought a flair for color uncommon to the Anglo population of the day.
Though men traditionally made the native West African wall hangings, the art form here on the North American continent has been dominated mostly by women. Initially, most textiles were made by men in Africa. Yet when slaves were brought to the United States, their work was divided according to Western patriarchal standards, and women took over the tradition. However, this strong weaving tradition left a visible mark on Black quilting by women.
Coded Messages and the Underground Railroad
It is also thought slave families produced quilts with hidden coded messages, particularly during the Underground Railroad, to reveal safe houses for runaway slaves, or to communicate coded messages to one another. The reason for these secret codes is that escaping slavery was life or death and many enslaved individuals couldn’t read or write, so communication occurred through word of mouth, songs, quilting, and many other creative outlets. In order for these messages to work, they combined quilting patterns with secret messages such as “staying on the drunkard’s path” and “following the stars” to reach Canada. Harrriet Tubman herself created quilts for “fugitives” in Canada.
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Since the 1990s and early 2000s, quilters and scholars have challenged claims that coded quilts were used on the Underground Railroad. Nevertheless, unifying threads that demonstrate unique styles can be found within specific local communities like Gee’s Bend, Alabama.
This fact wasn’t discovered until 1994 when writer, educator, collector, and historian Jacqueline Tobin, traveled to the Old Marketplace in Charleston, South Carolina. While there, an elderly woman by the name of Mrs. Ozella McDaniel, stopped Tobin and told her to “write this down” as she told the story of quilts being used during the Underground Railroad. This story was passed down to her orally from her mother and grandmother. It was a story that Mrs. Ozella never told anyone before, but something compelled her that day to tell our people’s history.
Thanks to her, we now have the book Hidden in Plain Valley: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad by Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard, Ph.D. that details the importance of quilting during this time.
Key Figures in African American Quilting
A History of African American Art: Harriet Powers—2: Bible Quilt (Reading a Bible Quilt)
One of the most prominent quiltmakers to emerge from this era was Harriet Powers, who was born into slavery and survived the Civil War. Known today as the “mother of African American quilting”, her world-renowned “story quilts”, wove Biblical or secular tales with a moralising message into their core and they are among the most celebrated works of art in history. She began exhibiting them in 1886 at the Cotton States and International Expo. Now her quilts, Bible Quilt, is at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and Pictorial Quilt is at Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Existing as a slave, bearing at least nine children and being subject to a racist and sexist society, Powers seems to have remained steadfast in her faith. The function of her quilts falls in line with story quilts of contemporary artists who are using this medium to express their own steadfastness in what they believe to be significant.
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Quilt by the Quilters of Gee's Bend
The Quilting Community of Gee’s Bend
The much-celebrated quilting community of Gee’s Bend in a remote region of Alabama emerged in the 1930s, where a close-knit group of African Americans established their own distinctive approach to making quilts. Though individual styles varied, by the 1960s the group had earned a wide following for their vivid colours, asymmetric designs, and innovative modernist arrangements of abstract shapes.
About an hour southeast of Selma, on a horseshoe bend of the Alabama River, sits Gee’s Bend, a town of roughly 200 people whose homemade quilts hang in museums and galleries worldwide. A 14-mile trail of wooden billboards reveals the legacy of the town and its quilting matriarchs.
Gee’s Bend is named for Joseph Gee, a North Carolina entrepreneur who bought land in Alabama for its fertile plains and built a cotton plantation in 1816. The plantation housed 17 enslaved people who planted cotton seed in the spring and pulled and ginned cotton into the fall and winter. Some of the Pettways still talk about the original quilter, Dinah Miller: kidnapped from an unknown land in Africa, sold for a dime, and brought to Alabama in 1859 to work Pettway’s plantation. They say she planted the seeds that made quilting blossom and germinate among the enslaved Pettways.
Unlike the organized, precise patterns that many white quilters made from Dutch and English designs, African American quilts were often raw and vibrant. They were stitched by hand with imagination and resourcefulness; old cotton dresses, frayed ribbon, and cotton seed bags offered unusual color palettes and textures.
The quilts were a blessing for the town: bold, colorful, and reminiscent of modern art, their distinct styles became popular beyond Gee’s Bend. Mary Margaret Pettway stitches a quilt. Even dignitaries like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Gee’s Bend. In 1965, he told the residents that they were crucial to the fight for civil rights and that their quilts gave him and other activists renewed strength to keep marching.
Not only did the quilts make money but they also taught the women of Gee’s Bend the value of their talents.
Although Mary Margaret’s mother Quinnie was a well-known quilter, she made simple, traditional patterns. Mary Margaret was heavily influenced by her father’s sisters: Lucy T. Pettway, Revil Mosley, and Ruth Pettway Mosley. Aunt Lucy taught Mary Margaret the differences between hand sewing and machine stitching, how to frame a quilt, how to create historic patterns, and the freedom of abstract work-all passed down from her grandmother, Mary Ann. Eventually, Mary Margaret says, she could look at a finished quilt and tell whether her mother or one of her aunts had made it. “Not everyone quilts alike,” she insisted. “Some of them do long stitches, or irregular ones. The older people are so precise.”
Using threads and cloth that mimic nature’s palette or creating the complex spirals of the Dutchman’s Wheel-12-block star patterns bursting with color, like a kaleidoscope-Mary Margaret’s quilts embody the legacy of Black America.
Contemporary Quilters and Their Impact
In contemporary times many African American women are keen to adopt quilting styles that reflect upon both their rich visual heritage and the many stories of their complex and troubled past, lending their work striking visuals and a political urgency, from Faith Ringgold and Marla Jackson to Sherry Shine and Bisa Butler.
This story has enriched the history of quilting in the Black community, but it doesn’t end there. Quilting became very prominent in the 1970s with artists such as Carolyn Mazloomi, Faith Ringgold, and Cuesta Benberry. Due to this, Carolyn L. Mazloomi formed the Women of Color Quilter’s Network (WCQN) in 1985 to “educate, preserve, exhibit, promote and document quilts made by African Americans”.
The black feminist that Ringgold is, she, at one time, painted images based in black feminist sensibilities with oil paint on canvas. But as the Harlem resident began to speak a language that her community could understand, she became formidable. The book Tar Beach and the quilt Tar Beach 2, might be the works for which Ringgold is best known.
African American quilt historian Cuesta Benberry also observes a rising trend towards celebrating the unique African strands of their past in these artists and many more, noting, “Quilters are making conscious and deliberate efforts to incorporate African themes in their works.
Quilting is much more than just a needle and thread. It is an integral part of American history, with individual quilts serving as historical documents that tell a story of the past. Quilting has played a significant role in the history of Black American folk art and American folk art as a whole.
These emerging artists create bright, colorful, and tactile artworks that challenge the notion of what “real art” can be. Their artworks are founded on traditions handed down to them from mothers and grandmothers. While they can serve the function of keeping bodies warm in cold weather, they also serve the function of telling African American narratives in keeping with African artistic traditions.
The art of Beverly Y. Smith, Bisa Butler, and Sherry Shine, emerging artists who use quilting as a medium to challenge identity politics and relay particular African American female narratives, speak to the functionality of quilts in both practical and theoretical ways.
The traditional African textile usage of bright colors, asymmetry, and large shapes is seen in the quilt of the Gee’s Bend quilters.
During slavery, women patch-worked quilts out of scraps of fabric to keep themselves and their families warm. At the same time as many quilt makers provided warmth for themselves and their family members through the production of quilts, they were also creating quilts that demanded significant skill and that succeeded in being aesthetically pleasing.
As contemporary quilt makers promote the tradition of quilt making as high art and use black women’s stories as subject in their quilts, they establish a tradition in art that appreciates the unique beauty and aesthetics of black women.
The Women of Color Quilters Network
Carolyn Mazloomi describes herself as an elder African American woman, born and raised in the Jim Crow segregated south-a wife, mother, and grandmother, as well as an artist. When quilt making became central to her life, she began to wonder who else was making quilts that reflected her life and experiences.
“In my travels I would see quilts for sale, but I never saw African American quiltmakers. I wondered, ‘Where are all the quiltmakers? I see the quilts, but I don’t see the makers.’” She put an advertisement in a national quilt magazine and asked that any African American quiltmakers reading the magazine contact her.
As a result, nine women wrote to her, and each was thinking the same thing: that they were the only Black quilter around and working in isolation. That's how she founded the Women of Color Quilters Network in 1985 (Four years earlier, she had founded the African American Quilt Guild of Los Angeles).
“For me,” Mazloomi says, “It has always been about finding a place in American quilt history for African American quilts.” Over the course of two generations, the network has become a family, and recently, a selection of their quilts have become part of SAAM’s permanent collection.
“It’s a beautiful thing to have support not only personally, but professionally, in our art form. I think this is one of the reasons we have lasted 40 years. We, as quiltmakers, always have something to say. So, we will always keep swinging that needle and cutting the fabric and making the quilts until we can’t do it anymore.”
Quilting as a Continuing Tradition
“To look at a quilt today is to behold history. Looking at a quilt today is to look at a piece of history, with a story to tell about the past.
So many other African American families have a similar story.
They tell the stories of our love, our resilience, our strength, our grief, and our hope. They encapsulate good and bad memories throughout our lives. They remind us of sick days at grandma’s, of pretty colors, and of days spent in the sewing room. They remind us of life and death. Quilters like Ed Johnetta Miller, Michelle Flamer, Donette Cooper, and so many other Black men and women, are continuing to tell our stories. They are keeping alive the #BlackLivesMatter Movement and remembering the names of those killed by police brutality. Our stories are important to keep Black history, my history, alive. They will never end and we will never stop using quilting to tell them.
“It’s so important to the history of Black people,” says Mary Margaret. “I don’t want it to be a lost art.” Many Gee’s Bend families left to go to school or find work. Now elders are slowing down and unable to quilt. Arthritis grips their hands. Diabetes makes it tough to see those intricate stitches.
Nevertheless, Mary Margaret and Loretta believe the Gee’s Bend quilts hold power-not just with the museum visitors or Oprah viewers, but with a new generation of artists: Bisa Butler’s vibrant quilts reflect Black life, blurring the line between contemporary and folk art. The colorful, defiant quilts of New York artist Jeffrey Gibson tackle multiple questions about his indigenous heritage, queer history, and popular culture.
The more people learn about their family’s history, Mary Margaret and Loretta say, the more they value where they come from. Many of the younger Pettway cousins are starting to make their first quilts.
“They see the legacy of continuing quilt-making,” says Mary Margaret. “I am so proud of that.” Maybe-just maybe-the family tradition will bring more of them home to Gee’s Bend.
“Anyone can learn, if they have the desire,” Loretta explains.
