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When I was a young kid, our beds were covered with solid-colored (mostly pastel shades of blue and pink and green) cotton blankets of no particular distinction—probably purchased at Woolworths at some distant point in the past or collected from St. Vincent de Paul’s Society Store on the edge of town. Come winter, the army blankets were taken from the top shelves of the small closets in the two bedrooms and placed on top those tattered and stretched all-season blankets. These were dark olive green, scratchy, and rough but I loved mine and eventually convinced my father to let me take it with me to college. At my paternal grandmother’s home, though, every bed was covered (all year round) with a beautiful, handmade quilt. They were faded and worn from years of rough washing and line hanging but they offered a comfort and security that only added to the nurturing feel of her house. These were traditional, utilitarian, not-very-creative quilts made by women on the bayous of Louisiana as special gifts or for added income.
My introduction to African American quilting, though, came from Crafted Lives: Stories and Studies of African American Quilters by Patricia Turner. A wonderful collection of the lives and art of nine contemporary African-American quilters, it was also in the first chapter of Section Two that brought me to the story of Harriet Powers. Anyone who quilts or appreciates the medium understands that they are more than just blankets or throws; some quilts can teach us about the culture in which they are made and about the people who made them—from the materials used to the colors and patterns selected, these particular quilts are windows into the migration, cultural heritage, and experiences of African American families in this country. The diamond shapes that often appear are reminiscent of the cycles of life in African art, the asymmetrical patterns and bold contrasting colors are remnants of African textile traditions, and the broken patterns speak to the common tradition of keeping evil spirits at bay. Story quilts—my favorite subset—are typically involve appliqué and border on magical realism.
A living time capsule on this entire tradition can be found in the multi-generational work of the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers—a place, a people, and a tradition that capture the essence of the African American experience through quilts. One of several recordings of this community of quilt makers is the coffee table volume, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, which will make you want to abandon wickedness and start going to church.
The women of Gee’s Bend—a small, remote, black community in Alabama—have created hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present. Resembling an inland island, Gee’s Bend is surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River. The seven hundred or so inhabitants of this small, rural community are mostly descendants of slaves, and for generations they worked the fields belonging to the local Pettway plantation. Quiltmakers there have produced countless patchwork masterpieces beginning as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, with the oldest existing examples dating from the 1920s. Enlivened by a visual imagination that extends the expressive boundaries of the quilt genre, these astounding creations constitute a crucial chapter in the history of African American art.
A few more resources I should mention, if you’re interested, is Kyra E. Hicks’ Black Threads: An African American Quilting Sourcebook, where the author goes to some pains to trace the social, artistic, economic, and cultural foundations of this art. She begins with the spinners and weavers of slaves brought to this land, moves through the historic Underground Railroad quilts used “to mark escape routes and houses of refuge for runaway slaves,” and ends with a representative sampling of modern and contemporary artists. A Communion of the Spirits: African-American Quilters, Preservers, and Their Stories by Roland L. Freeman is a national survey of Black American quilters, presented chronologically from the 1940s, with plenty of pictures of the artists and their work. Also, Always There: The African-American Presence in American Quilts by Cuesta Benberry, a renown historian and archivist of quilting, is worth a read. She traces the influences of African-American quilt makers on the overall art and craft of the American quilt.
But given my love of folk art and the memory of quilts made by my grandmother’s contemporaries (one which I still have), I want to focus on an early practitioner whose work is almost non-existent (only two known pieces survive) but whose artistry is, simply put, stunning. Harriet Powers was an enslaved African-American, farmer, artist, and quilt maker from rural (Clark County) Georgia. She used traditional pictorial squares in appliqué techniques and styles native to West Africa to record local history and biblical stories on her quilts. Though often referred to as an illiterate farm hand in early biographies, a letter was discovered in 2009 that showed Powers as a literate, thoughtful woman who took her work seriously. The only two quilts known to have survived are the Bible Quilt (c. 1886) and the Pictorial Quilt (c. 1898)—considered among the finest examples of 19-century Southern quilting.
Born into slavery, she lived on a plantation near Athens, Georgia. She married Armstead Powers in 1855 and had nine children, which she raised on a four-acre farm she and her husband owned sometime in the 1880s but which had to be sold off (in parcels) as they experienced financial difficulties in the 1890s. Her husband eventually left Harriet (after defaulting on taxes on the farm) in 1895; she raised her family and—from most accounts—probably supported her family as a seamstress. Little of her work survives to this day, but that which does shows a deep and skilled understanding of storytelling and meticulous craftmanship. Her grave is in Gospel Pilgrim Cemetery in Athens and records her death as January 1, 1910.
You can find a short biographical entry for Ms. Powers at American Art Gallery (which seems to agree with most of what I’ve been able to dig up on the artist, though with an unfortunate typo on her year of death right up there at the beginning). A brief but interesting explication of her Pictorial Quilt (which draws from contemporaneous explanations offered by the artist) can be found at Artstor. The only “scholarly” work I’ve been able to track down on Harriet Powers (which I have not read) is a self-published book by Kyra E. Hicks, This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers’ Bible Quilt and Other Pieces.
First below is a short (if slightly hackneyed) video produced by the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. on Harriet Power’s Bible Quilt; following that is a presentation of the African American Heritage Museum of Southern New Jersey for a show of quilts. Lastly is a video by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, “And Still We Rise: The Women Behind the Quilts.” I hope you enjoy them.
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