DIARY: African-American Quilts at BAMPFA
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is home to one of the world's largest collections of African-American quilts — some 3,000 of them. Bequeathed to the museum in 2019 by the estate of the late private collector Eli Leon, the collection is important because of its vast size and because of the detailed records Leon kept about each quilt he acquired.
"These are beautiful artworks that can be enjoyed from an aesthetic point of view," said BAMPFA's associate curator and academic liaison Elaine Yau, who curated the museum's upcoming exhibition, Routed West: Twentieth Century African American Quilts in California. "But how they're really significant is thinking about how we regard the history of everyday Americans."
Routed West traces the flow and flourishing of quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration. As millions of African Americans sought greater opportunities and escape from the South’s oppressive racial environment from 1940 to 1970, they carried quilts as functional objects and physical reminders of the homes they left behind.
Simultaneously, the quiltmaking skills that many migrants brought with them—frequently learned from mothers, grandmothers, and other kin—spurred the creation of a new wave of African American quiltmaking in the later part of the twentieth century, extending its roots into the Western United States. The quilts in this exhibition explore the medium’s unique capacity for connecting kin across time and distance, holding memory and ancestral knowledge, and opening up space for beauty and artistic ingenuity.
Consisting of one hundred artworks representing nearly eighty individuals—many of them women with ties to the Bay Area—and recent works by local Black quilt artists, Routed West honors quiltmakers of this distinctive migrant generation and those who carry forth their aesthetic and cultural legacies. A dozen of the featured quiltmakers in the show are part of the African American Quilt Guild of Oakland, a multi-generational group that offers its members community and skill-sharing, as well as opportunities to exhibit their work.This is the first group exhibition of artworks drawn from the African American quilt collection at BAMPFA. Enhanced by a fully illustrated exhibition catalog with significant new scholarship, the exhibition invites audiences into a conversation around the quilts’ joyful power as objects of African American cultural heritage and artworks within expansive histories of art in the United States.
The exhibition is further enriched through a continuing program of public events for participants of all ages, with hands-on art making, gallery tours and talks. Schedule
BAMFA, 2155 Center Street, Berkeley, CA Info