Obituary: Eli Leon, scholar who collected quilts created by African Americans
Eli Leon, a Bronxborn, Oakland psychotherapist who quit to devote his life to becoming a foremost scholar and collector of African American quilts, has died at 82.
Leon died unexpectedly March 6 of septic shock at an Oakland care facility, leaving behind 3,500 quilts and a North Oakland home overstuffed with American ephemera, from vintage photographs to meat grinders. His death was confirmed by Jenny Hurth, trustee of the Eli Leon Living Trust.
“Eli Leon turned the full force of his exceptional intelligence and visual acumen onto the field of African American quilts,” said Lawrence Rinder, director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. “His exhibitions and publications, as well as his phenomenal collection, leave a profound legacy.”
Leon discovered African American quilters by accident in the mid-1980s, when he went to the Alameda flea market in search of traditional patchwork quilts. He chatted up a vendor named Effie Mae Howard, a Richmond quilter, who was selling all forms of junk.
She ended up inviting Leon to her home to see her quilts, and he purchased a red and black velvet quilt that her dog had been sleeping on. That was the start of an obsession that carried both Howard and Leon to exhibitions at BAMPFA and the Oakland Museum of California.
Howard was shy, so Leon gave her a show name: Rosie Lee Tompkins, and the name became one of the best known in African American quilting.
Leon also collected works by Laverne Brackens, Arbie Williams and Mattie Pickett, among others and became their close friend and benefactor.
“Most of them had learned to quilt out of necessity,” said Carin Adams, curator of art at the Oakland museum. “Having somebody pay attention to and put value on their work, as art, spurred their creative production.”
Leon created an assembly line, purchasing the patterned tops from the quilters as soon as they were finished, then taking them to five or six other quilters in Oakland, whom he hired to stuff and stitch together blankets. Eventually, Tompkins became famous as a mainstream artist with Leon as her main collector and promoter.
African American quilts became collectible, and prices inflated to $50,000 per quilt. But if Leon sold, he only sold to museums, and very few at that.
“He was interested in promoting these as art,” Hurth said. “He remained firm that these quilts should remain in the public eye for research and enjoyment.”
Soon after he met Howard, Leon closed his psychotherapy practice to dedicate his life to quilts. He immersed himself in study, tracing the African American tradition to West Africa, and through the slave ships. He got a Guggenheim Fellowship to further his research, and used the stipend, around $30,000, to buy a Winnebago and drive through the South, to add to his collection.
In this sense, he was the quilting answer to folklorist Alan Lomax, who drove the Mississippi Delta looking for country blues singers to record. Leon had contacts from the quilters he’d met in the Oakland area.
“Eli would drive the motor home right up to their houses and knock on the door,” Hurth said. “Sometimes they’d let him in, and sometimes they wouldn’t.”
After he hauled his load home to North Oakland, Leon built a two-story climate-controlled storage facility that housed nothing but quilts stacked up.
“He lived surrounded by quilts,” said Adams, who visited while curating the Oakland museum show. “You stepped over the threshold and you were in this amazing world that he had created for himself.”
The exhibition, “YoYos and & Half Squares: Contemporary California Quilts” ran from Sept. 12, 2015, until Feb. 21, 2016, and consisted of 20 quilts from Leon’s collection.
All of this was a long way from Robert Stanley Leon born June 6, 1935, to a Jewish family in the Bronx, N.Y. His father was a watch repairman who emigrated from Lithuania. Leon attended the prestigious High School of Music & Art in Manhattan, and upon graduation in 1953 he changed his name to Eli.
He attended Oberlin College and then transferred to Reed College in Portland, Ore. He graduated in 1957, and got his master of arts degree in psychology from the University of Chicago.
He married a classmate from Reed and they moved to Oakland to both work for IBM. They were divorced in 1964. As a psychotherapist, Leon saw patients in his home, specializing in marriage counseling and group therapy for gay men.
In the 1970s, Leon came out as gay himself, and had been in a longterm relationship. He never stopped collecting, trolling eBay and hitting the flea markets.
“Everybody in the quilting world knew who he was,” Hurth said. “They came to him.”
In 2012, Leon was diagnosed with dementia and started to wind down his collection. In 2015, he was moved into memory care at Bayside Park in Emeryville, and his collection of quilts was put in art storage. It has not been determined what will happen to it.
Survivors include a sister, Alice Rodin of San Diego; niece, Jamie Rodin, also of San Diego; and nephew, Jonathan Rodin of Massachusetts.
He was buried at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto, with a public memorial to be announced.