Folk quilts: contemporary African-American

Throughout history, quilts have held an important and often cherished place in our culture, society and family traditions. Created in domestic settings, quilts serve both decorative and practical purposes. The creator typically is a woman and is not professionally trained, but learned the essential skills in the home from her mother or relatives.

The quilts quickly became treasured by the owners and often were passed on through the family to become prized heirlooms. Though the materials and techniques may be common, quilts--as process, as art and as image--reflect the very fabric of our history and democracy.

The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts is premiering a new exhibition, Just How I Picture It in My Mind: Contemporary African American Quilts from the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. This extraordinary collection was recently acquired by the Montgomery Museum through a partial purchase and a generous donation from Kempf Hogan of Birmingham, Michigan.

Over a period of 17 years, Hogan assembled the quilt collection, consisting of 48 carefully chosen objects dating from 1950 to 2001, many of them with the guidance and expertise of Robert Cargo, one of the foremost folk-art authorities in the country.

As the exhibition and its accompanying full-color book beautifully illustrate, the Hogan collection encompasses the work of a diverse group of Southern African-American quilters working primarily in Alabama and its environs during the last half-century. Crafted by some of the medium's most well-respected artisans, both within the region and nationally, the designs of these carefully sewn fabrics range from the traditional to the most contemporary forms of expression, and represent everything from abstract patterns to narrative stories.

Some of the better-known quilters represented in the exhibition include Janie Avant, Mozell Benson, Maw Duncan, Nora Ezell, Dot Foster, Sallie Gladney, Floydzeller Graves, Bessie Hood, Mattie Jackson, Roberta Jemison, Mary Lucas, Mary Maxtion, Lureca Outland, Plummer T Pettway, Maggie Smith, Catherine Somerville, Sarah Mary Taylor, Pearlie Tucker, Odell Valentine and Yvonne Wells.

The exhibition contains various patterns and themes found throughout the history of quilt making. However, while all the quilts in this exhibition were created by African-American women, it is difficult to categorize the quilts into a common theme, style or construction. Although many share similar characteristics, the quilts and their makers are individual and unique, thus resistant to easy classification.

Some elements suggest geographic identification. For example, quilts made by rural black women in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi share certain features such as: bold strips, bright colors, large designs, asymmetry, multiple patterns, symbolic forms and improvisation.

Pioneering quilt historian Maude Southwell Wahlman in her publication, Signs and Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts (Tinwood Books, 2001), further suggests that these very motifs not only identify Southern quilters, but also link them to African textile traditions and techniques.

Clearly, some patterns and styles seem to be African in influence; yet, some of the same motifs are also the result of practicality and economy. The basic purpose for making a quilt was to provide a warm bedcover. Rarely were new fabrics purchased for such a project. The materials on hand might be meager, so the quilter would, by necessity, need to improvise with the few fabric fragments available. Each quilt maker had an aesthetic and decorative design in mind, but functionality and efficiency were equally important ingredients.

Folk quilts generally can be divided into two groupings based on their overall designs: geometric quilts and illustrative quilts. Most quilters work by hand and will use a sewing machine only rarely and then, usually for long seams along borders.

Geometric designs are created by piecing or patching together triangles, squares and rectangles. Frequently, blocks of geometric forms are sewn together and other sections are repeated independently. Eventually, all sections are then sewn together to form the finished quilt.

Sometimes the results are symmetrical and balanced in the overall design; at other times, the sections might not match or are of different sizes requiring the quilter to make alterations to even out the sides of the quilt. Such improvisational adjustments can make for some unexpected but amazing designs.

Piecing allows the quilter to use the smallest scraps of fabric--leftovers from one project or fragments cut from another garment--to build amazing combinations of patterns and textures that could never again be matched or replicated. One quilter, Nora Ezell, boasted, "Scrap quilts are the prettiest quilts, more so than the ones where people try to match all the pieces up."

Commonly used geometric patterns include: the "star," for its physical and spiritual references; the "housetop," built with strips of horizontal and vertical bars suggesting a birds-eye view of a housetop; the "log cabin," similar to a housetop except that bars alternate between light and dark colors; the "bar" design, straight strips of different fabrics that run the length of the quilt; and the "sampler" or "everybody" quilt, made of separate blocks of designs sewn together.

The illustrative quilts, where image dominates over design, include imagery that are categorized as "picture quilts" or "story quilts." The distinction is clear. In a picture quilt, a representational image is presented as a single overall motif, of can be reduced in scale and repeated in a series of blocks of different colors and patterns. Such pictures are usually recognizable to the viewer, but their meaning may be unknown, except to the quilter. Animals are popular themes, as is the American flag.

Story quilts, as their name implies, tell a story, and can he as sophisticated in many ways as narrative images in other media. Quilt artists communicate lessons from the Bible, episodes from history, interpretations from personal experiences, stories unique to the black experience or the struggle for civil rights, and imaginary representations and personal visions.

In addition to subject matter, quilters who depict narrative imagery must also deal with an entirely new range of pictorial elements such as: methods of representation, space, form, depth and perspective. This becomes especially complicated when the quilter incorporates several episodes of a story into a single quilt.

Just How I Picture It in My Mind: Contemporary African American Quilts from the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts will be on display at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts March 25-May 7, 2006. Following this initial presentation, the collection will be made available as a traveling exhibition to museums across the country for a three-year period.

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color illustrated hardback book of the same title with an extensive essay by quilt historian Mary Elizabeth Johnson Huff. Information on the scheduling of the exhibition and on the purchase of the book can be found on the Museum's Website: mmfa.org.

Mark M. Johnson is Director of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Mongtomery, Ala., and a Contributing Editor for Arts & Activities. Note: All photo captions from Mary Elizabeth Johnson Huff's, "Just How I Picture It in My Mind: Contemporary African American Quilts from the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts" (River City Publishers; 2006).

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