In a new exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, over 30 works showcase the significance of this quilting tradition

Kaila Philo February 24, 2025

Unveiled to the world in 2018 at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the presidential paintings of the Obamas broke from the pattern of stodgy official portraits before them by featuring bold colors, evocative imagery and subtle homages to Black American history. Former first lady Michelle Obama wears a black-and-white gown with blocks of color woven throughout in her portrait, created by painter Amy Sherald. The artist explained that the pattern of her dress reminded her of an enduring cultural tradition: quilting.

At the unveiling, Sherald said the dress “resembles the inspired quilt masterpieces made by the women of Gee’s Bend, a small, remote Black community in Alabama where they compose quilts in geometries that transform clothes and fabric remnants into masterpieces.”

Quilts—large, patchwork fabric blankets often donned with ornate designs and patterns—are typically seen as crafts for homemakers or family heirlooms. But for Black Americans, these pieces of art may carry an inheritance beyond just their family lineage. As demonstrated in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s new exhibition at its Renwick Gallery, “We Gather at the Edge: Contemporary Quilts by Black Women Artists,” quiltmakers have long sewn the thread of Black history into their work. The exhibition is composed of over 30 quilts by contemporary Black women artists across the country.

Aleia Brown, a history scholar at East Carolina University, served as a guest curator on the exhibition. As a Black woman herself and an expert in Black material culture, she was drawn to the ways that Black women’s history manifests itself, with quilting as a clear standout. The artists “have these incredible styles in their approach to storytelling,” she says.

The featured works were collected by Carolyn Mazloomi, an aerospace engineer with a passion for quilting herself—a passion that has led her to five decades of curation, collection and creation.

After she started making quilts, she became interested in quilt history. As Marie Claire Bryant writes for Smithsonian’s Folklife magazine, some legends say enslaved Africans in the antebellum South integrated quilts into the trails of the Underground Railroad, using them as guides to point out escape routes and places of refuge along the way. A quilt with a bow tie, for example, signaled to the viewer to wear a disguise to appear higher status, while a bear paw meant to follow an animal trail through the wilderness to find food and water.

She says she noticed that earlier generations of quilt historians, who were by and large white, made broad assertions as to what the work symbolized, but they didn’t capture the breadth of the medium’s diversity.

“At one time, quilting was used to preserve and express African American traditions, but it was also one of the few art forms that marginalized folk could use to tell their stories,” Mazloomi says. “So people think that most of the quilts in the Black community are improvisational quilts, and that’s just not true.”

Quilting became a mode of storytelling within the Black community, as well as a means of gaining financial self-sufficiency throughout the South after slavery. Some of the most famous designs from this region come from Gee’s Bend,Alabama, the small historically Black community tucked in a bend in the Alabama River that painter Sherald referenced.

The area was named after Joseph Gee, an enslaver who built a cotton plantation there in 1816. Later, the Gee family sold the land and the enslaved workers there to a relative named Mark Pettway, who then forced several of the enslaved people to adopt his last name. Within a few generations—through which passed the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Great Depression—the federal government bought the plantation and parceled out the land to the remaining Black Pettways.

Dinah Miller, an enslaved woman who was brought to the plantation in 1859, sparked the community’s generational interest in quilting. From Miller onward, the Pettways developed a skill for the craft that was so beautiful and distinctive that Gee’s Bend became renowned as a destination for quilting as modern art. The quilters of Gee’s Bend and nearby areas in Alabama formed collectives to sell their work, and their quilts were even put on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the early 2000s.

According to Mazloomi, while this deep Southern heritage is vital to understanding quilting in Black history, too much emphasis on this area has “pigeonholed” the medium.

“The Black quilting community is very diverse,” she says. “Insofar as styles of quilts found within the community, we have everything: folk art quilts, contemporary quilts, art quilts, traditional patchwork quilts utilizing all kinds of techniques imaginable.”

Ultimately, Mazloomi says, you can’t understand Black quiltmaking in just one way.

The quilts showcased in “We Gather at the Edge” are from Mazloomi’s personal collection, and they run the gamut from nationally recognized artists to lesser-known artisans. Mazloomi acquired them through her years overseeing the Women of Color Quilters Network, an organization she founded in 1985 to “present, preserve and educate the public about these quilts,” she says. This year marks the network’s 40th anniversary.

Mazloomi was called to start the organization after years of exploring quilting around the world. “In my travels, I would go to galleries and I would see traditional African American-made quilts, and they were selling for enormous sums,” she says. “I wondered if that money trickled down to the quiltmakers themselves.”

She put an ad in Quilters Newsletter, seeking women of color working in the medium who may have been in need of community. Soon, a handful of them reached out to her. “We were quilting in isolation,” she says. “We were not in any guilds. We were not in any quilt groups. We were just solitary quilters … and just thought we were, like, the last people in the States that were quilting.” But word of the new organization spread, and over time, the network amassed over 1,500 Black quilters.

The organization became a place where people not only knew the monetary value of their work, but also the cultural significance of it, Mazloomi notes.

Among the network’s ranks are artists like Betty Ford-Smith, who creates pine cone-shaped quilts made of over 1,000 pieces of fabric; Chawne Kimber, a quilter and mathematician who often writes messages (“You Are Loved,” “I Am Still Not Free”) into her pieces; and Bisa Butler, a contemporary fiber artist who’s become known for creating vibrant Black portraiture.

The exhibition organizers sought to place an emphasis on interpretations of “the power and liberation within Black women gathering and creating,” Brown says, whether it be cultural or political. For example, one quilt featured in the exhibition is Gwen Maxwell-Williams’ We Are Not There Yet (2012), which honors the 1965 creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Established by Congress, the EEOC was made to uphold civil rights laws against discrimination in the workplace based on various factors of identity, such as race, color, sex, religion, age, national origin and disability. The quilt depicts people protected by the EEOC, including a pregnant figure and a person using a walking cane.

Citing the introduction of bills that seek to limit the discussion of racial history in schools and the censoring of Black history and restricting of Black history booksin recent years, Mazloomi says she believes this exhibition couldn’t have come at a better time. The quilts, she remarks, serve as a reminder of how Black Americans have dealt with issues of race throughout turbulent periods of American history, and as a “reflection of the creativity and the resilience and the history of our communities.”

Brown agrees, noting that the showcase’s title and message attest to this togetherness: “We gather to collectively imagine new worlds,” Brown says. “We gather to remember what we are told to forget. We gather to see one another.”

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/from-the-antebellum-south-to-the-civil-rights-movement-black-american-women-have-long-told-their-stories-through-quilts-180986106/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial&lctg=93490758