Even before the Textile Museum's show of African American quilts opened yesterday, people were trying to get in. Their interest is a measure of the intense excitement this form of artistic expression is generating nationwide.
Ever since New York's Whitney Museum of American Art put 60 Alabama quilts on its walls last fall, people have been marveling that impoverished women descended from slaves could quietly turn out brilliant works of modern art.
The museum on S Street NW is offering 20 quilts made in Alabama, though not the ones that astonished critics and visitors at the Whitney. Those were "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," and the really good news is that show is due at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in February. Meanwhile, the Textile Museum offers a terrific prep session.
These quilts were mostly made in the 1990s, and they range from updated renditions of traditional quilt patterns to marvelous abstractions in sassy blocks of bold color. A technique known as "strip quilts" strikes some scholars as inspired by African textiles. The cascades of color -- especially oranges, greens and browns -- are more than close cousins of woven kente cloth. There is also a freewheeling pattern that quilters call "crazy," with lavish bits of lace and swatches of silk. Startling graphic renditions of red and blue coffee cups could have been inspired by Andy Warhol. A softly colored collage edged in faded denim and filled in with bits of thin plaid shirting and dress cottons gets right to the heart of the quilters' lives.
| Continue Linda Hales' Washington Post article "They Come From Alabama With Blanket Artistry"
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