And Still We Rise: Race, Culture and Visual Conversations, a travelling exhibition of quilts currently on show at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, is a “historical timeline… to talk about the history of the presence of African Americans in [the United States]”, says its curator, the artist and historian Carolyn Mazloomi. “Everybody’s familiar with quilts, so it’s an easy way to talk about and address difficult subject matter.” It’s also a relevant medium: quilting, particularly when slaves were forbidden to read and write, “was a method of communication,” Mazloomi explains “it was a method of empowering people with a voice through cloth”.
For the show, Mazloomi asked 100 members of the 1,500-strong Women of Color Quilters Network, which she founded around 30 years ago, to choose a year in nearly four centuries of African American history to commemorate with a quilt. Forty of these quilts—which use a variety of techniques, including appliqué, painting, photo-transfer and beading—are on display in the Bruce museum leg of the tour.
Some of the pieces celebrate important milestones, like the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving vs State of Virginia, which struck down a state law forbidding interracial marriages, and historical figures like the anti-lynching journalist and early Civil Rights activist Ida B. Wells, who was born a slave. Others bear witness to violence, injustice and hardship, including from events in the recent past, such as Hurricane Katrina.
The presentation ends with Visionaries of Our Freedom (2012), a quilt by Sherry Whetsone-McCall that Mazloomi calls “an anniversary celebration”, anticipating 2019, which will mark the 400th anniversary of the first arrival of Africans in the United States. Looking through the history was often difficult, Mazloomi says, who lived through the Civil Rights Era, but it is also “a celebration of joy… when you stand back and look at all the contributions… through all the ups and downs—and we’re still here. We’re still here, and still we rise.”
The exhibition, which was organised by the Women of Color Quilters Network in partnership with the Cincinnati Museum Center and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, will be at the Bruce Museum through 24 April. The next scheduled stop for the show is the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia, where it runs from 19 September to 1 January 2017.
