For generations, colorfully patterned quilted blankets have served as statement bed linen for many Black households, whether folded gently over the foot of the bed or as ornamentation across the arm of a sitting room sofa.
But, with an artistry as old as the history of America, quilts have served much more than décor. For many, they are powerful works of art, used as a private tool for communication that supports hopes, dreams and documented records of victories won.
Quilting’s symbolism looks back to ancient African imagery, including those of the Kongolese cosmogram, an African prayer symbol that represents birth, life, death and rebirth. For the enslaved, these deep emotional connections to African roots became important ties to their identity and a strong sense of belonging that withstood erasure and whitewashing.
A quilting bee is a communal process of creating quilts; a gathering of like-minded individuals who work on independent or collaborative quilting projects while they exchange skills and treasured information with one another. With this purpose, below is a present-day quilting bee of six Black women artists who have used the calling of textiles to share their stories and how they exert their survival, activism and liberation within the world. With the use of Southern craft traditions, they awaken the memories of their female ancestors, whose work was often downgraded to the borders of art but have now gained the recognition it deserves.
Nettie Pettway Young
Born in 1917, Nettie Pettway Young, a founding member of the Freedom Quilting Bee, started quilting when she was seven years old. Taught by her stepmother in Alabama in an area known as Young’s, which was a part of the old Young Plantation in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, she went on to inspire generations of Gee’s Bend quiltmakers and contemporary artists alike.
Southern quilting groups, including Gee’s Bend and the Freedom Quilting Bee, both in Alabama, maintained the ancestry of the craft while creating an economic platform for independence and political involvement. Inspired by a visit from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1965, Young formed the Freedom Quilting Bee a year later after he encouraged the women of Gee’s Bend to participate in the civil rights movement. With sales from their handmade quilts, the collective raised crucial funds that were channeled back into the community to invest in civil rights activism.
The Freedom Quilting Bee represented the economic sovereignty, community and self-reliance that became an important means of survival for its members. In 2002, Young told The New York Times, “The Bee was the first business Black people in Wilcox County owned. It was the first time I was special, the first job I had, excusing cotton picking.”
Young’s work, “Housetop” (1970) is currently held in a group exhibition, “Beyond the Surface” at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. It is on view until May 14, 2023.
Sonya Clark
“Come stitch next to me, and I’ll tell you a story”, Sonya Clark’s grandmother would say. She taught Sonya how to sew when she was a young child and today, her work uniquely illustrates the deep meaning of heritage by interlacing hair fibers with thread and fabrics into triumphant stories of Black identity and how we cherish our freedom.
Many of her quilts blend the United States and its Confederate flags, replacing their distinctive features with unexpected components like braids and Bantu knots. “I believe our hair is a text,” Clark told ARTnews, “a scroll of our ancestry coiled in each tight curl that mimics the twist of our DNA.
Hair is like the universe’s handwritten script of who we are, what we have endured and our infinite possibility.”
Aliyah Bonnette
Raleigh, North Carolina, artist Aliya Bonnette is also completely inspired by her grandmother and began quilting after learning about the critical role quilts played in designing guides to the Underground Railroad. When she shared her interests with her grandfather, he showed her the quilts and fabrics her late grandmother had made.
Bonnette’s work incorporates empowering portraiture that expresses a level of body autonomy never afforded to women of earlier generations. “Over time, I have taught myself a process of improvisational quilting to physically connect to my grandmother and the practices of my women ancestors,” she states. “By incorporating the very fabrics and unfinished quilts she touched and sewed herself, my practice becomes a space to stitch together the stories and memories of Black women across generations.”
Dawn Williams Boyd
A textile painter, Boyd is known for combining elements of quilting with commentary to create messages about America’s social institutions. In “The Tip of the Iceberg”, her first solo show at Fort Gansevoort in New York City (2022), she presented 12 works that explicitly addressed issues on racism, voting rights, the environment, police brutality and the endangerment of Roe v. Wade, among historically violent events, as illustrated in her piece, “Massacre on Black Wall Street”.
Not only does the piece depict the destruction, it pays tribute to those who were unaccounted for, embellished with images of a mass grave of skeletons enveloped by a large tree adorned in West African Adinkra symbols, representing cultural and spiritual bonds to home.
Her work denounces the orbital issues we continue to face today – those that put humanity and our survival at risk.
Faith Ringgold
An artist, author, educator and organizer best known for her story quilts, Faith Ringgold is one of the most influential cultural figures of her generation. With a career that links the Harlem Renaissance to the political art of working young Black artists today, her indelible work draws from personal memoirs and history that both document her life and highlight the struggles for political consciousness. Her 2022 traveling retrospective “Faith Ringgold: American People” presented a body of work that spans an over 50-year tribute to leaders who fought for freedom and equality.
In one of her acclaimed quilts, Ringgold honors Black women from across time whose activism continues to resonate today. It portrays a group of women happily gathered within a lush field of brightly painted sunflowers, all holding up a quilt that represents their personal achievements. Around the border of their collective quilt are their names: Harriet Tubman, Madam C.J. Walker, Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker and Mary McLeod Bethune. Standing alongside the group is a depiction of Vincent van Gogh holding a vase of sunflowers, seeming to offer them to the women as a gesture of recognition and appreciation.
This piece, The Sunflowers Quilting Bee at Arles (1991), is a celebration of Black women and the common ties that bind, strengthen and uphold them.
Precious Lovell
North Carolina-based artist Precious Lovell transitioned from a twenty-year career in New York City to one of educator and contemporary artist. Her work explores how fabric is used to express social critique and important moments in history.
In 2008, Lovell began creating her “Warrior Women of the African Diaspora” series, a collection of quilted and embellished shirts inspired by traditional African warrior/hunter shirts. It honors the memories of overlooked Black women freedom fighters in history. And in 2019, she created the Freedom Seekers War Shirt for the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh for an expedition called “Quiltspeak: Uncovering Women’s Voices Through Quilts.”
As a nod to North Carolina’s strong historical connections to how enslaved labor built the textile industry, Freedom Seekers War Shirt is a quilted garment made from renderings of collaged newspaper clippings of “runaway ads” about 45 enslaved women from Wake County, including Raleigh. Their names are embroidered in bright red thread to symbolize courage, violence, anger, power and love. Next to each woman’s name, Lovell implants a single crystal tear – a subtle reflection of the loss and pain endured by these women in their pursuit of freedom.
“Although no longer the case, historically fiber arts were considered women’s work,” Lovell said in an interview. “However, even in the historical sense it has been a vehicle for activism, memory making, and historical preservation.”
