In Spring 1998, the National Humanities Center's white walls were transformed by a colorful collection of African-American quilts on loan from the Robert Cargo Folk Art Gallery in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. This show was inspired by Gladys-Marie Fry, 1997-98 Fellow and Professor of English and Folklore at the University of Maryland. Author of Stitched from the Soul: Slave Quilting in the Ante-Bellum South (1990), she has curated twelve such exhibitions, one of which is currently on view at the Smithsonian Institution. Here she comments on several of the pieces the Center displayed. (Photos: Kent Mullikin)

The exhibition at the National Humanities Center featured thirty-seven quilts, dating from the 1920s to the present day. The majority were pieced by women in their sixties and seventies who were teachers, farm workers, domestics, and housewives. They learned quilting from their mothers and grandmothers, but unfortunately almost none of their daughters seems to be interested in carrying on the tradition. And--most unhappily--few of the women whose works appeared in this show are any longer quilting, overcome by ill health and infirmities of age.

Gladys-Marie Fry

Some of these quilts unquestionably reflect the Southern experience, in particular the regional tradition of Green County, Alabama. The one above, for example--"Mules" by Betty Rogers (1988)--captures a popular theme, perhaps based on the belief that after the Civil War former slaves would be given "forty acres and a mule" by the Freedmen's Bureau. Most of the pieces in the show, however, demonstrate how influential Africa has been in shaping the design techniques, color choices, and motifs of African-American quilting.

The "strip aesthetic," as vertical strips of patches are often called, may be seen in two quilts made by Lucile Young. Narrow woven strips of cloth, produced on vertical looms by male weavers in Africa, are prototypes for the similar asymmetrical shapes in America. The African connection is also suggested by recurring motifs, particularly the geometric shapes which are found in the quilts shown here--triangles, checker-boarding, diamonds, and star patterns.

Another interesting aspect of these quilts is the "make do" nature of the materials used in them--old flour sacks, feed sacks, worn work-clothes (particularly blue jeans and buttons), reused curtains, discarded coats. As one woman told me, "You take whatever you have on hand and make something out of it."

(More, to Part 2 of 2,
photographs of quilts)

Ideas Director's Desk | Pre-Raphaelite Arts | Private and Social Reading | Poems | Recollections | African Loom to American Quilt | The Practice of Reading