I once visited a small town outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi, where my mom was born.

Just twenty minutes down highway 49 from Clarksdale, Tutwiler is a tiny residential town surrounded by sprawling agricultural fields. Tutwiler is made up of a tight knit, predominantly Black, community who goes to church every Sunday followed by a potluck. The town is centered around a large community center where all the neighborhood kids go after school to craft, play basketball, and finish their homework. From what I remember, the community center is made up of three main rooms. One with two large sport courts and another lined with tables for eating, crafting, and studying. 

The third room is a small quilting shop where community members sell a wide array of items including quilted blankets, pillows, coin purses, and keychains. The quilted blankets are particularly impressive. Their intricate, vibrant, motifs line every inch of the walls in the room. With some failed sewing attempts myself, I was in awe of the complexity of the designs. It was evident that they were working with over a century of combined experience and centuries more of passed down knowledge. I learned from the women working that despite the low tourism to the town, the quilt shop helps sustain the daily runnings of the community center and individual families. They sell the quilts online for a range of prices and, with growing recognition, ship their quilts all over the country. [1] In an interview with Delta Magazine, community center director Melanie Powell described, “‘Right here in the Mississippi Delta, where we don’t have a lot, we take what we have to keep people around the world warm and to continue that art”. [2] 

Upon later research, I learned this practice is not unique to Tutwiler but ingrained in African American history. Tutwiler’s community center quilt making formally started in 1988, but the art has been alive in African American communities for as long as members can remember. Another town called Gee’s Bend has a similar business. The small town in Alabama is made up of Black residents descended from those who were enslaved on the land before the Civil War. The people took ownership of the land and built a community after emancipation and flight of the landowner and cotton industry. To support themselves, they begin quilting. Community members talk about an original quilter, Dinah Miller, who was kidnapped from an unknown location in Africa and sold to a local plantation in 1859. [3] The community recounts that she taught their ancestors to quilt, a skill which has been passed down between old and young women ever since. [4]

There are also reports of other communities who have been quilting before emancipation, as enslaved women were often tasked with the mending and household textile work of white households. [5] According to African American Studies scholar, Tracy L. Vaughn-Manley, women quilted using scraps to supplement the inadequate, if any, bedding provided by enslavers. [6] In addition to necessity, Vaughn-Manley describes that the act of gathering fabric, designing, and carefully stitching the quilt was a ritual for Black women. Many women often worked together on a single quilt, around which they would talk and be momentarily liberated from their other roles. [7] Long after emancipation, many groups of Black women come together to work on a single quilt. Today, people continue to describe quilting as liberating. When interviewed by Delta Magazine, Melanie Powell from Tutwiler remarked, “‘You get a sense of freedom when you’re able to make your own money, and when you’re able to make your own money doing a craft or something that you like, that brings extra joy’”. [8]

This sense of liberation for the makers is stitched into each quilt. As the skill of quilting has been passed down each generation, quilting has become a practice of preserving cultural memory and community. Through quilts, many women tell a story of resilience through artistic expression while also creating an ode to those who came before them. In Tutwiler, the women describe a powerful balance between sewing generational patterns and altering them with their own artistic voice. Community member, Martha Williams, described thinking about passing history down to younger generations as she stitches her quilts. “‘It comes through my hands’, she says”. [9] Through this process, the tradition of quilting has long created a kind of alternative archive for Black women in the US, which contemporary artists now draw on. 

In order to appreciate quilting and its cultural legacy, it may be useful to look through the lens of collage, an artform defined by its use of many materials. Literally translating to “gluing” in French, collage art is best known as cutting out images from magazines and newspapers to construct a new image. [10] The new image of such a process often has a modern, pop art, funky vibe to it. However, the reality of collage art is less specific. A collage is any art that is made through bringing many materials together. [11] The lens of collage requires breaking an art form into its material components, in this case revealing the process through which African American women preserved the cultural memory of their communities through quilting. 

Quilting is grounded:

Collage is fundamentally grounded in the use of other materials to make one image. [12] To make a collage, one inherently manipulates and builds off previous work. In this manipulation, collage artists are forced to engage with other cultural creations, whether that be magazine designs, clippings of other’s words, or fabrics from various locations. [13]Part of the skill of collage is conveying meaning only through found materials. 

In quilting, the materials tether the quilt to the women and community who made it. 

The fabrics used may be scraps from other projects and worn clothing items. In this case, each fabric scrap takes on new life but remains defined by its origin in the community. People may recognize pieces of old loved items woven into the larger pattern of the quilt. This part of quilting feels very intimate, as community members are warmed by pieces of art created from other items. 

In other quilts, new fabric is purchased specifically for the quilt, such as in the quilts sold in Tutwiler and Gee’s Bend. [14] With more freedom of choosing materials, the quilts can be incredibly vibrant. The skillful patterns and awesome array of colors are reminiscent of the bold colors and patterns used in African art, clothing, and other designs. Specific motifs of African American quilting have also been passed down as women taught each other the skill. [15] In these cases, the structure of the quilt helps tie it to cultural memory. 

After a quilt is made, it often becomes a cherished item of generational memory, remaining grounded in the community. For many years to come, the quilt stays close with the family. It is cherished both as a valuable heirloom and source of comfort and warmth, as if the matriarchs of one’s lineage continue to nurture for generations. I see this as a feminist resilience, where legacies live on in communities despite attempted erasure. A legacy in part made possible by the conventions of the quilt as both artform and utility. 

Quilting is disruptive: 

In addition to being grounded in what came before, collage is also disruptive. It is created by dismantling other’s production to make one’s own meaning. In their article, “Notes on Acting Up: Collage and Quilting as Pedagogy”, artist and educator Curry Hackett argues that collage disrupts the western focus on compliance over innovation. Instead, collage demands re-thinking. One set of materials can be manipulated to produce completely different works. College asks one to, “find rather than propose, to assemble while deconstructing, to repurpose while making something new” [16]. These conventions of collage disrupt white ideas of innovation and creation which rely on the extraction of new resources, historically tied to colonization. Collage rejects objectivity and asks you to look into what you have to create something new.  

Quilting can be put in a similar light. In the making of a quilt, one manipulates existing textiles into a new item. African American quilts in particular disrupt white and western textiles, even before emancipation, to create new patterns that evoke African heritage and preserve cultural memory. In addition, the ritual of quilt making among Black women offers a community and sense of freedom that has historically disrupted assigned and constrictive roles. 

Quilting is renewed attention and revival:

  Lastly, collage and quilting are an ideal medium for renewed attention and revival of what was previously lost. This is especially important in Black communities which have long endured intentional erasure, in part through gross misrepresentation in archives. As mentioned previously, this can be tied to the cultural memory inherent in the patterns and construction process of African American made quilts. 

A contemporary collage and quilt artist, Bisa Butler, embodies this idea. Butler’s work marries collage and quilting in the form of quilted portraits that add renewed life to the faces of Black history [17]. She does this by enlarging historical images of Black Americans and carefully marking the design of the quilt. Then, she uses a variety of vibrant fabrics to recreate the image with her own design. Through her process, Butler brings black and white images to utter life with extreme color [18].

The subjects of Butler’s art, too often nameless to history, stare at the viewer with unwavering eyes, as if demanding recognition [19]. Consistent with the quilting medium, Bisa is intentional about her fabric choices beyond just color. Her fabrics are sourced from all over Africa – including Ghana, where her father is from – and are from a variety of materials including cotton and silk. In Butler’s words, 

“‘My subjects are adorned with and made up of the cloth of our ancestor. If these visages are to be recreated and seen for the first time in a century, I want them to have their African Ancestry back, I want them to take their place in American History’”

Bisa Butler’s work fully embodies the idea of using collage to bring new life to something already existing. For her, it is about using African materials and colors to revive the historically erased images of Black Americans. Her work is one of many that assures the legacy of quilting in the Black community is not a story left untold. When faced with attempted erasure, Butler has contributed to the revival. Her work is currently shown in several galleries across the United States. 

Conclusion: 

Through thinking about quilts in the context of collage, it becomes clear how the quilt is a prominent thread in African American history. Its grounded nature in material, practice, and memory, intimately stitches the art to the community. Similarly, the convention of using existing materials is seized by women to disrupt oppressive western structures. Finally, collage as quilting helps to give new life and renewed attention by affording artists the tools to imagine existing images in new ways. 

Examining quilting through the lens of collage has revealed new depth and dimensions to the incredible art form. By breaking down quilting into the process and materials, I have gained appreciation for the cultural legacy of the medium. For generations, Black women have supported, preserved, and created community through artistic expression. When I look back at photos of the quilts in Tutwiler, I am again struck by the complex, vibrant, patterns emulating the centuries of knowledge shared between the women.