20th Century African American Quilts in California

SeeGreatArt.com
9/13/26

The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) presents an exhibition of more than 80 quilted objects traceing how Black women leaving the Jim Crow South stitched a legacy of survival, connection, and resilience across generations. On view from September 18, 2026, through January 17, 2027, Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California features works by more than 70 artists spanning 120 years. Exhibited on the East Coast for the first time, this must-see exhibition tells a uniquely American story through quilts from the Second Great Migration to today.

Organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), where it debuted to strong acclaim in 2025, Routed West traces the flow and flourishing of quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration, a mass movement of approximately five million African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North and West between 1940 and 1970 in search of a more equitable life. Many of the hundreds of thousands who migrated to California carried quilts—not only for warmth and protection, but also as emblems of ancestral memory and cultural survival.

“Routed West threads the needle between Black people’s historical movements and their quilts to tell stories of collective care, resilience, and creative ingenuity,” NMWA curator Orin Zahra, who organized NMWA’s presentation of the exhibition, said. “Underscoring the individual, family, and community-based stories of these quilt-makers, Routed West embodies NMWA’s commitment to sharing lesser-known stories and counternarratives about artists whose contributions to American culture are profound. As featured artist Sherry Ann Byrd said, ‘Quilt-makers are among the female warriors of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.’”

The quilts reflect their creators’ artistic and technical brilliance, resourcefulness, and legacy. Employing expert skills and often using found materials, such as tobacco pouches, denim, and work clothes, they disrupted and blurred boundaries between “craft” and “fine art.” Routed West also reveals the artistic legacy of quilting, a living language shared across generations from matriarchs who lived through the Civil War and Emancipation to contemporary artists. These textiles are cherished heirlooms that honor ancestors, pass down technical expertise, and stitch family bonds.

“NMWA invites audiences to see these quilt-makers not at the margins of art history, but as essential figures in the story of American art,” NMWA Director Susan Fisher Sterling said. “Black women artists transformed cloth into a language of experimentation, memory, and visual power. Routed West also advances our goal to challenge and disrupt gendered hierarchies, by positioning fiber arts as equally significant to traditionally venerated genres such as painting and sculpture.”

Exhibition Overview

Routed West is organized within five thematic sections:

The quilts in Southern Roots highlight artistic approaches that reappear throughout the exhibition, such as the use of repurposed work clothes, improvisational piecing, pattern-based quilting, and tying. Hattie “Strawberry” Mitchell (1854–1942), one of the earliest quilt-makers in the exhibition, was born into slavery and spent her life laboring and working for white families. She quilted both for them and for personal use. After a transatlantic trip in 1906, Mitchell began working on a quilt of repeating green-and-red botanical forms patterned after leaves she collected while abroad, recording the locations of their origins with embroidery. Minnie Skinner (1920–2003) created a “britches quilt” in the late 1940s made of repurposed denim pieces, joining whole pant legs into a patchwork pattern.

Carried and Kept explores how quilts transcend their utilitarian purpose to become heirlooms and cherished objects. Many of the quilts in this section were brought to California by migrants from Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas. They offered literal and emotional protection, keeping them warm, preserving their southern roots, and anchoring their identity in a new landscape.

A hand-pieced quilt by Alice Neal (1916–1985) is a poignant tribute to her Louisiana-born mother, Mary Bright. Neal made the quilt in Oakland soon after her mother’s death in 1954, using leftover material from the dress Bright wore in the photo that inspired the quilt’s portrait. A replica of Bright’s hat snaps off to reveal a silk cap, and patterns carry personal meaning, such as the nine-block motif that was the first design Neal learned from her mother. 

As teachers, nurses, seamstresses, truck drivers, grocery store managers, shipyard workers, and other members of a laboring class, artists in the section Rooted West used quilt-making to reclaim time for themselves, pursuing an activity that could be meditative, centering, and liberating. A 1991 quilt by Lily Chiles (1918–2000) features the continent of Africa and was created with her grandchildren. It affirms intergenerational care through a pan-African consciousness rooted in Oakland’s Black radical politics. As the elder quilter, Chiles guided her grandchildren in piecing and embroidering names of African countries onto the quilt. Isiadore Whitehead (1914–2005) was a school bus driver who quilted, and the school community donated fabric to help her create many projects, including the bedding, drapes, and pillows in an ambitious large-scale bedroom installation on view in the exhibition.

A variety of fabric choices also appear in quilts by Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006), Johnnie Wade (1908–2015), Gussie Wells (1901–1994), and Arbie Williams (1916–2003), with the distinctive textures of satin, nylon, and polyester double knits offering novel alternatives to cotton. Tompkins sourced secondhand jeans to create distinctive blue-hued pillows, using denim as a way to reference her upbringing in rural Arkansas and memorialize her ancestors.

Tending Generations explores the relational dynamics of quilt-making by showcasing the work of multiple generations within families, demonstrating how African American quilt-making strengthens and nurtures the bonds between women, celebrating their wisdom and imaginative potential. Sisters Beauty Vaughns (1911–2005) and Arbie Major (1915–2013) learned technical skills of piecing from their seamstress mother, Pearl Nunley (1888–1952). Vaughns’s Ocean Wave-patterned quilt(1963) and Major’s Snowball string quilt (ca. 1950–52) both demonstrate the meticulous and repetitive process of measuring, cutting, arranging, piecing, composing, and stitching. Together with Nunley and Vaughn’s Flower Garden (Sunflower variation) (1940), these quilts underscore a powerful lineage of African American women’s labor, creativity, and ingenuity.

Another family of quilters includes Gladys Durham-Henry (1906–1996), her daughter Laverne Brackens (b. 1927), granddaughter Sherry Ann Byrd, and great-granddaughter, Bara Byrd-Stewart (b. 1975). Byrd’s playful improvisation of orange, yellow, red, and blue stripes in Cultural Merger at Crossroads, USA (1990) echoes the lively rhythm of free jazz.

In the decades since 1980, roughly two dozen African American quilt guilds have been founded throughout the United States. As a coda to the exhibition’s historical narrative, A Living Tradition features works by contemporary artists and collectives who are keeping traditions of African American quilting alive today. United We Win! (2024), a vibrant narrative quilt from a larger quilt project on the history of the Hunters Point Shipyard by Stacey Carter (b. 1969) and William Rhodes (b. 1966), was made in collaboration with African American who were employed at the shipyard during World War II and afterward. The series exemplifies the persistent power of quilt-making as a forceful language for elevating stories of Black life in California. Education’s Promise (2025), by Niambi Clay (b. 1951), was inspired by a work from Jacob Lawrence’s iconic Migration Series in which three African American girls write on a chalkboard. Clay’s work addresses civil rights setbacks of the Second Great Migration, as well as present-day oppression and harsh realities.

Routed West is drawn from quilts from the African American Quilt Collection at BAMPFA, the largest collection of its kind, and contemporary work from the Bay Area. The exhibition’s presentation at NMWA is part of the museum’s multifaceted participation in Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, an initiative of Craft in America. 

About BAMPFA

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) ignites cultural change for a more inclusive and artistic world. BAMPFA has been uniquely dedicated to art and film since 1970, with international programming that is locally connected and globally relevant. It holds more than 25,000 artworks and 18,000 films and videos in its collection, with particular strengths in modern and contemporary art and historical Chinese painting, as well as the world’s largest collection of African American quilts.

As part of the University of California, Berkeley, BAMPFA is committed to artistic diversity through its robust slate of art exhibitions, film screenings, artist talks, live performances, and educational programs that shed new light on the art of the past and connect audiences with leading filmmakers and artists of our time.

National Museum of Women in the Arts

The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) is the first museum in the world solely dedicated to championing women through the arts. With its collections, exhibitions, programs, and online content, the museum inspires dynamic exchanges about art and ideas. NMWA advocates for better representation of women and nonbinary artists and serves as a vital center for thought leadership, community engagement and social change. NMWA addresses the gender imbalance in the presentation of art by bringing to light important women artists of the past while promoting great women artists working today.

The collection highlights a wide range of works in a variety of mediums by artists including Rosa Bonheur, Louise Bourgeois, Lalla Essaydi, Lavinia Fontana, Frida Kahlo, Hung Liu, Zanele Muholi, Faith Ringgold, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Amy Sherald.

NMWA is located at 1250 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. It is open Tues.–Sun., 10 a.m.–5 p.m., and closed on Mondays and select holidays.

Admission is $16 for adults; $13 for D.C. residents, visitors 65 and over, students and educators, active-duty military and veterans, and visitors with a Native/Tribal Affiliation; and free for visitors 21 and under, visitors with disabilities, and SNAP/EBT card holders. Admission is free the first Sunday and second Wednesday of each month.

For information, call 202-783-5000, visit nmwa.org