Quilts: They’re Not Just for Grannies
The Frist Art Museum’s latest exhibit Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston dives into the history of American quilt making with 47 quilts and related works. A plaque at the beginning of the exhibit tells us, “One reason quilting has become to associated with the United States is its reputation as a democratic art form, accessible regardless of class, race, ethnicity, age, or gender.” This exhibit seeks to highlight the diversity in this art form, and to bring to light the voices that have been silenced in the creation of these works. Full of works from different eras and different fabrics, I was taken aback by how much history can be told through quilts.
Although art has never shied away from being political, I never considered that many quilts have been made to share a powerful message. The first quilts on display were made specifically to encourage people to vote. One entitled Hoosier Suffrage Quilt was made before 1920 with embroidered names of suffragettes. In another made by Irene Williams in 1975 with old clothing and household textiles, the word “vote” appears over and over. In another room hangs #howmanymore, made by Sylvia Hernández in 2018 as a protest against gun violence and a memorial to its victims. One quilt, a 4th grade class project, is political simply by the very act of its creation. It was made by students at Poston War Relocation Center, a concentration camp in Arizona, the largest of 10 that were established by the US government following the attack on Pearl Harbor to detain people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom were American citizens.
In a section titled “Unseen Hands,” quilts from the 17th and 18th century are shown. A plaque tells us that the makers of many of these are unknown, and we must acknowledge that while “a person or family who owned a quilt may have be documents, it was probably made and cared for by several individuals within a household, including domestic servants (many of whom were indentured or enslaved).” A stunning, all blue, single cloth quilt hangs with no known creator. The color of the cloth was made with indigo from indigo plantations. The plaque informs us that “In the seventeenth centruy, Europeans established indigo plantations in South America, the West Indies, and Mexico. These plantations…relied on the labor and knowledge of enslaved people from areas of West Africa with a long history of indigo cultivation and dyeing.” A gorgeous red and blue “painted calico” quilt is made with printed fabric made in India. As always, the plaque provides important context, “The popularity of quilts like this one brought protests from England’s wool and silk weavers. In 1700, the British Parliament restricted the sale of Indian cottons in England, but a loophole permitted the British East India Company to sell printed cotton cloth throughout the colonies and in West Africa, where it was the most important commodity in the barter for enslaved people.”
Anyone interested in the history of quilts should know about Gee’s Bend, Alabama. The area is named after Joseph Gee, a planter from North Carolina who established a cotton plantation in 1816 with seventeen enslaved people. The Gee family operated the plantation until 1845, when they relinquished ownership, including 98 enslaved people, to Mark H. Pettway. The following year, Pettway relocated Gee’s Bend, transporting his family and furnishings in a wagon train while forcing 100 enslaved men, women, and children to walk on foot from North Carolina to Alabama. Many members of the community still carry the Pettway name. After emancipation, many formerly enslaved people stayed on the plantation as sharecroppers, which left them perpetually in debt to the landowners. In the 1930’s, through federal intervention, the residents of Gee’s Bend became landowners of the land worked by their enslaved forebears.
Throughout the years, Gee’s Bend women made quilts primarily to keep themselves and their families warm in unheated houses that lacked running water, telephones and electricity. Many quilts were also imbued with spiritual meaning, serving as a way to memorialize loved ones after their deaths. The majority of early twentieth-century quilts were made out of old work-clothes and other used materials such as fertilizer and flour sacks, because the women had to work with whatever they had. In March 1966, more than 60 quiltmakers from Gee’s Bend, Alberta, and surrounding communities met in Camden’s Antioch Baptist Church to found the Freedom Quilting Bee. The Bee, one of the few Black women’s cooperatives in the United States, landed contracts with major retailers, such as Bloomingdale’s and Sears, to produce made-to-order quilts and other quilted products, helping to inspire a national revival of interest in patchwork. [Here is a link with more info https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/gees-bend-quiltmakers]. This exhibit had a few beautiful quilts from Gee’s Bend. Housetop, 12-block Variation was made around 1965 by Lillie Mae Pettway. One of her daughters, Mary Ann Pettway, manages the Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective today.
Whether it makes a particular statement or not, no one can deny that quilting is an art form. Some modern quilters wish to make something beautiful or interesting. Have you ever seen a quilt in the shape of a sphere? Krakow Kabuki Waltz by Virginia Jacobs is a quilt covering a rubber weather balloon, making it the most unique quilt I’ve ever seen. The most visually stunning quilt is To God and Truth created by Bisa Butler in 2019. Bisa Butler used thousands of brightly colored textiles to create this composition taken from an 1899 photograph of the Morris Brown College baseball team. A video of an interview with Bisa Butler plays next to the quilt to inform us of her motivations.
Don’t miss this year’s Art in the Atrium project, a selection of textile works made by Nashville-based artists Ashley Larkin and Shabazz Larkin. The most impactful piece is series of forty-six portraits by Shabazz Larkin that are printed and stitched on sail canvas entitled The Fragile Black Man series. Larkin states that “they serve to dismantle the myth of the monolithic Blackness. No two are alike, because no two of us are. Every third portrait places the figure in an orange jumpsuit – a painful, necessary reflection of the statistic that one in three Black men in America will be caught in the criminal justice system.” Find out more about Larkin here: https://www.larkinart.co/
I may have mistakenly thought this exhibition would be boring, or perhaps more suited to my 65-year-old mother who was very excited to go, but I was proven wrong from the first quilt. I loved this exhibit, and you shouldn’t miss it. I promise that no matter your age, you’ll find Fabric of a Nation engrossing and illuminating. It will be in the upper level galleries at the Frist until October 12th. Find out more about the exhibit here: https://fristartmuseum.org/exhibition/fabric-of-a-nation-american-quilt-stories/
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Bethany is a wife, mother, and dog mom. In her spare time she likes to read, write fiction, and go out with her family. She feels lucky to live in Music City where she can go to the symphony or theatre all the time.
