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Patterns of improvisation

Two exhibitions of vintage African-American quilts show how women created uncommon beauty from common scraps of fabric.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published January 31, 2005

	[Images courtesy of the Tampa Museum of Art]
	Sarah Mary Taylor, Man with Two Dogs Quilt, 1981, cloth.
	Square roots The quilts on display in shows in St. Petersburg and Tampa tell stories. They speak of their African-American makers, of industriously putting every scrap of fabric and second of time to use. But the quilts say more. Their colors and patterns recall African roots. Some designs are maps for runaway slaves. A log-cabin pattern, its center squares in black, became a flag signaling safe harbor when hung out to air.
	Mozell Benson, Log Cabin Quilt, 1979, cloth.
	Susie Ponds, Green Snake Quilt, 1979, cloth.

You could say that in the most general way, oppression cultivates improvisation. Many people through the centuries, as individuals or as groups, have survived because they learned to be creative but probably none more so than blacks brought to America as chattel beginning several hundred years ago. Generations of African-Americans endured enslavement and the more subtle Reconstruction cruelties that followed (and continue in many cases today) because they schooled themselves in squeezing much from very little.

Even in that worst-case scenario, improvisation, necessitated by deprivation, sometimes flowered into cultural gifts. We would be a poorer world without the improvisational genius from self-taught blacks who have brought us Southern-fusion cuisines, jazz, gospel, blues and outsider art.

Add to those manifest contributions quilting.

A collection of 20th century quilts made by black women living in the isolated Alabama community of Gee's Bend caused a sensation when it opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 2002 and continues to do so as it travels to major museums in the United States through 2006. When it stopped at the Whitney Museum in New York in 2003, a critic for the New York Times called it one of the best exhibitions of the year.

We aren't getting "The Quilts of Gee's Bend" here but what that exhibition has done is validate this form of craft as museumworthy, much like what has happened with outsider art during the past 50 years. It has made possible several local exhibitions of mostly 20th century quilts by black women who have lived poor, circumscribed lives and learned to quilt from preceding generations of relatives. The larger exhibition, "Signs and Symbols," is at the Tampa Museum of Art. Another, "Grand Ma's Hands," is divided between the Arts Center and the Studio @ 620, both in downtown St. Petersburg. Some are made by Gee's Bend women; all are examples of African-American women's improvisational skills in the face of disadvantage and their ability to create something beautifully coherent from the random scraps life throws at them.

That said, neither show has the focused, graphic punch of the touring "Quilts of Gee's Bend" though the group at the Arts Center comes close. And besides, that is not the purpose of "Signs and Symbols," curated by Maude Southwell Wahlman, a professor, art historian and owner of most of the quilts at the Tampa Museum. It is a more cerebral show that seeks to deconstruct the iconography used by generations of these crafters.

The important thing is to approach these quilts with joy, not gravitas, for that is the spirit in which they were made. I confess to being a little irritated with the lavish catalog published in conjunction with the Gee's Bend exhibition that provides multiple essays discussing African-American quilts in art-museum speak, with complex explanations of their composition and comparisons to highly schooled professional painters from a western European tradition such as Barnett Newman and Paul Klee.

Puh-leez.

Such analysis comes off, to me, as patronizing. These are dirt-poor women who, for the most part, never had access to that kind of inspiration. They learned to make quilts in a time-honored tradition to keep their families warm. Tens of thousands have been made by thousands of women. It's no surprise that within that large population, isolated by segregation, a smaller number had innate talent and good eyes for design and color that they used to elevate their quilts above the utilitarian. Their inspiration came from their immediate surroundings and, more amazingly, from within.

An important difference about all these quilts is they usually eschew the western quilting tradition that demands rigorous symmetry and codified patterns. That tendency was born of necessity. The women had to use whatever fabrics they could scrounge, and piecing a Log Cabin design in matching materials was a luxury they rarely had. I also think that once the creative impulse kicked in for some of these women, a stubbornness and pride endemic in all artistic people kicked in, too, leading them to begin experimenting.

The Pettway women have become quilting legends and they are well-represented in the Tampa Museum show. This large family originally hailed from Gee's Bend and took the last name of the plantation owner. Martha Jane Pettway's quilt is an example of a basic technique called strip quilting, in which bands of fabric are pieced into strips much like the narrow strips of woven cloth typical of many African textiles. Lazy Gal Quilt by Pearlie Jackson Posey at the Tampa Museum illustrates strip quilting at its most pure with vertical stripes of solid material in pastels. Like many of the quilters, Posey throws in a surprise. Two of the strips are pieced with two colors instead of one, breaking the rhythm. That stylistic departure was perhaps born of necessity - running out of enough long, single-color strips - but the arrangement she chose, random or contrived, gives panache and individuality to an otherwise bland design.

A dazzling example of strip quilting by an anonymous maker hangs at the Arts Center. It's the oldest quilt in the bunch, from the 1880s. Various reds anchor it visually, in both vertical and horizontal strips that surround squares made from shorter, narrower strips in muted tones. Looking at it, I understand the urge to invoke the names of great abstract artists.

I'm resisting the temptation.

These makers need to be honored and appreciated for their singular originality. So contemplate the virtuosity of Pecolia Jackson Warner's variation on the Log Cabin pattern at the Tampa Museum that also appropriates the Courthouse Steps pattern in a fabulously asymmetrical quilt using red and green fabrics with some well-placed blue pieces thrown in.

Quilts by Sarah Mary Taylor of Yazoo City, Miss., and niece of Warner appear both at the Tampa Museum and the Studio@620. Taylor pieces her quilts, then adds appliques. Animals and one human figure dance around her children's quilt at Studio@620, roughly cut and edges left unfinished. Their shapes suggest both simple nursery imagery and African mythology, either of which could be used for bedtime stories. The Sarah Mary Quilt is autobiographical; she is represented by a small female figure that resembles an African Vodou doll and she spells her address and phone number across the bright strips arranged to look like a return address sticker. These and other figurative applique quilts at the Tampa Museum reference African "charm" traditions in which certain symbols - hands, for example - ward off evil or calamity. The makers are wrapping their loved ones in protective covering both literal and spiritual.

Among the most exuberant quilts are those by Arester Earl of Atlanta at the Tampa Museum. Her Dream Quilt is made up of 100 squares in almost as many patterns, each containing an "X" pieced from more fabric. "Dream quilts" are another common denominator among many of these women that refer to childhood memories. The X, then, could be a cross that is both Christian and an African Kongo symbol that, like the Christian cross, represents life, death and rebirth.

Earl's "plate" or "wheel" quilt is another riot of jolly color and creative whimsy that can be enjoyed at that level or more deeply when one understands that the pinwheels of pieced cloth emulate the plates Kongo people put near graveyards to scare away evil spirits.

Lucinda Toomer's Drunkard's Path Quilt is a star-turn improvisation in which she takes the well-known squiggly quilt pattern and morphs it into a hurly-burly prism of curves within squares. Likewise Susie Pond's Green Snake Quilt, another takeoff on the Drunkard's Path pattern she uses as a snaking grid that looks like an overlay on patterned squares.

So many other discoveries to make at all three venues. A quilt at 620 is hung so we can see the cotton backing bearing the logo from an earlier life as fertilizer sacking. A quilt at the Arts Center made entirely of denim scraps, some with the outlines of removed pockets, is an artful assemblage of squares and rectangles, many burnished with a brown patina from soil and wear that no amount of soap or scrubbing can erase. Plummer Pettway's Box Variation Quilt, made in 1991, two years before she died, is a complex dance of color almost contained within a grid of blue strips that bursts forth when she substitutes a bright pattern in some of the grid. You think her frequent use of red signals some internal method of organization but then she perversely has two big blocks that are devoid of red or any other bright color.

Yes, I'm starting to think: an elaborate take on Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie!

Which means I'm thinking too much about these quilts. Better to let those persistent intellectual scales fall from my eyes. It's a gift to be simple and one to be free, goes the song. These quilters teach us that no matter what's happening outside, you can find both within.

Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com

"Signs and Symbols: African American Quilts" is at the Tampa Museum of Art, 600 N Ashley Drive, through April 3. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $7 adults, $6 seniors, $3 students and free to children 6 and younger. (813) 274-8130.

"Grand Ma's Hands" is at the Arts Center, 719 Central Ave., and the Studio@620, 620 First Ave. S, both in St. Petersburg. Arts Center hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. 727 822-7872. Studio@620 hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (727) 895-6620. Both venues are free.

[Last modified January 28, 2005, 12:13:09]