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- San Francisco Chronicle
Bay Area museum defies federal funding cuts with powerful African American quilt show
Even after losing more than $260,000 in federal support for its latest exhibition, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive isn't backing down.
'We will persist. We will continue,' BAMPFA director Julie Rodrigues Widholm told the Chronicle. 'We believe deeply that this is meaningful work.'
Indeed, 'Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California,' on view through Nov. 30, goes beyond simply displaying a kaleidoscopic delight of more than 100 quilts. The exhibition centers African American stories by incorporating profound historical research that reveals new depths to quilt-making traditions.
It would be hard to imagine a stronger rejoinder to the change in values at the National Endowment of the Arts and Institute of Museum and Library Services. It will be up to visitors to decide if the exhibition 'no longer serves the interests of the United States.'
The quilts by over 90 makers, nearly all Black women, trace African American history from the beginning of the 20th century through the Second Great Migration all the way to the contemporary quilters in Oakland today. Quilts made in the early 20th century were carried from the American South to the Bay Area during the Second Great Migration (1940-1970) when African Americans moved to port cities including Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle and, of course, Oakland.
Patterns, traditions, warmth and care were passed down to the next generation, whose quilts appear in the later rooms. Materials change over time: denim work clothes arranged into a grid in 1928 give way to corduroy in the 1940s. Gerstine Scott's playful assemblage of neckties announces the office life of 1989. Modern pieces — many figurative and narrative — made and lent by members of contemporary quilt guilds extend the legacy of the quilting tradition in the final gallery.
That BAMPFA should become a major center of African American quilts came as a surprise to the museum six years ago. Quixotic Berkeley collector Eli Leon had worked with former director Lawrence Rinder on exhibitions before, but hadn't mentioned he would bequeath approximately 3,000 quilts (the museum is still counting as they process, inventory, and document the quilts), increasing its permanent collection by 15%.
Curator Elaine Yau was hired to handle the unexpected influx. Quilts, when they have been exhibited by museums in the U.S., have typically been presented as analogues to abstract modern art with the implicit message that they should be valued insofar as they resemble gallery and museum art predominantly made by famous white men. 'Routed West' challenges that notion, urging viewers to appreciate the quilts on their own terms.
'Quilt making has existed and thrived without art museums for many decades,' noted Yau, acknowledging that fact led her to ask herself, 'What would it mean to think of the museum as the outsider and latecomer to the tradition? When you do that, you begin to ask different questions.'
Insights that emerged during collective discussions sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art among studio artists, quilt scholars, curators, historians and museum professionals centered the lives of the African American families who made the quilts, lived with the quilts and inherited the quilts. Exploring why a quiltmaker created a specific piece, how the quilt was used, what repair might tell us about the people who lived with the quilt are examinations of material culture — a methodology rarely applied to Jackson Pollock paintings and other modernist art.
This line of inquiry uncovers what Yau calls 'the ethics of care.'
'These are questions about how we choose to care for people in our lives,' she went on, 'how we choose to invest creative energy with an intention to care for other people.'
The robust and richly illustrated exhibition catalogue extends care to scholarship. Exhaustive research uncovered the names of quilt artists, mapped kinship ties and quilting networks that reveal how these works came to be. Oral histories add knowledge outside standard museum and gallery documentation.
'The object comes out of storage,' explained Yau, 'then there's this immediacy and the way it sparks the memory of another time and place.'
For instance, when presented a quilt made by her father, Thomas Covington, Yau said North Oakland resident Carlena White immediately began recalling memories of Covington quilting on rainy days when he couldn't work outside.
'I hope an exhibition like this becomes a bridge,' Widholm told the Chronicle, 'between the kind of intimate relationship we can have with certain kinds of objects and materials in our day-to-day lives.'
Widholm sees the project not only as an act of preservation, but also what she calls social justice.
'For me, social justice means acknowledging the humanity of everyone,' Widholm said, adding that art history without African American quilting would be incomplete, exclusionary and simply incorrect.
In that sense, the stakes of a show like 'Routed West' are about more than visibility — they're about how history is remembered and whose histories are recorded.
'If we don't make certain decisions to show and give space to certain kinds of artists, they may be forgotten,' Widholm warned, 'or not documented well enough to be discovered in the future.'
To counter that risk, the exhibition is accompanied by ample programming. A quilt documentation day on June 28, for instance, invites families to bring quilts to be photographed and recorded, along with oral histories, for inclusion in the national African American Quilt registry to ensure that these stories are not only preserved but actively woven into the broader fabric of American art history.
