Appreciating the art of radical quilting
Museum’s retrospective confirms artist’s standing as one of the U.S. greats
In 1997, I walked into the Berkeley Art Museum to be greeted by a staggering sight: an array of some 20 quilts unlike any I had ever seen. Their unbridled colours, irregular shapes and nearly reckless range of textiles telegraphed a tremendous energy and the implacable ambition, and confidence, of great art.
They were crafted objects that transcended quilting, with the power of painting. This made them canon-busting and implicitly subversive. They gave off a tangible heat.
The planets had aligned: I’d happened on the first solo show anywhere of Rosie Lee Tompkins, an exemplar of one of America’s premiere visual traditions: African-American improvisational quilt-making — an especially innovative branch of a medium that reaches back to African textiles and continues to thrive. Rosie Lee Tompkins was a pseudonym, I would learn, adopted by a fiercely private, deeply religious woman, who as her work received more and more attention, was hardly ever photographed or interviewed. She was born Effie Mae Martin in rural Gould, Ark., on Sept. 9, 1936. At the time of the show, she was 61 and living in nearby Richmond, Calif., just north of Berkeley.
Tompkins was an inventive colourist whose generous use of black added to the gravity of her efforts. She worked in several styles and all kinds of fabrics, using velvets — printed, panne, crushed — to gorgeous effect, in ways that rivalled oil paint. But she was also adept with denim, faux furs, distressed T-shirts and fabrics printed with the faces of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jr. and Magic Johnson.
A typical Tompkins quilt had an original, irresistible aliveness. One of her narrative works was more than four metres across, the size of a small billboard. It appropriated whole dish towels printed with folkloric scenes, parts of a feed sack and, most prominently, bright bold chunks of the American flag. What else? Bits of embroidery, Mexican textiles, fabrics printed with flamenco dancers and racing cars, hot pink batik and, front and centre, a slightly cheesy manufactured tapestry of Jesus Christ. It seemed like a map of the melting pot of American culture and politics.
While works like this one relate to Pop Art, others had the power of abstraction. One of her signature velvets might be described as a “failed checkerboard.” Its little squares of black and dark green, lime and blue, slide continuously in and out of register, creating the illusion of ceaseless motion, like a fractal model of rippling water.
This surface action, I discovered, reflected her constant improvisation: Tompkins began by cutting her squares (or triangles or bars) freehand, never measuring or using a template, and intuitively changed the colours, shapes and size of her fragments, making her compositions seem to expand or contract. As a result her quilts could be deliriously akimbo, imbued with a mesmerizing pull of differences and inconsistencies that communicates impassioned attention and care.
“I think it’s because I love them so much that God let me see all these different colours,” Tompkins once said of her patchworks. “I hope they spread a lot of love.”
That 1997 Berkeley show was my first Rosie Lee Tompkins moment. This September many more people will have similar moments of their own when “Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective” — the artist’s largest show yet — opens its doors once more at the Berkeley Art Museum for a run through Dec. 20. (It debuted briefly in February before the coronavirus lockdown.)
Tompkins grew up the eldest of 15 half-siblings, picking cotton and piecing quilts for her mother. In 1958, she joined the postwar phase of the Great Migration, relocating to Milwaukee and then Chicago, eventually settling in Richmond, Calif., a busy port and shipyard that had become a destination for thousands of African-Americans who moved out of the South, many bringing with them singular aspects of rural culture.
She studied nursing and, for the next two decades or so, worked in convalescent homes. During this time she married and divorced Ellis Howard, raised five children and stepchildren, and started to make quilts to sell at the area’s many flea markets, along with other wares. She even had a printed business card that offered “Crazy Quilts and Pillows All Sizes.” By the late 1970s, she was earning as much as $400 a weekend from sales and was able to quit her nursing job.
The flea markets were a quilter’s paradise in the 1970s, ’80s and beyond, places where the necessary materials were plentiful and cheap: printed, embroidered and sequined fabrics, beaded trim, crocheted doilies, needlepoint, buttons, secondhand clothing, costume jewelry — all of which, and more, Tompkins incorporated into her art.
The area was also paradise for quilt collectors, one of whom was Eli Leon, born in the Bronx in1935 and trained as a psychologist, whose collecting instincts verged on hoarding. Sometime in the late 1970s, after years of haunting the area’s flea markets, Leon zeroed in on the visual vibrancy of quilts, evolving into a self-taught scholar. Around 1980, Leon began searching out African-American quilts and interviewing their makers. At flea markets he would approach anyone selling anything to ask if they knew of quilts for sale. One day he asked a woman selling kitchen utensils: Effie Mae Howard. He would later write, “She was evasive, but eventually let on that she herself dabbled in the craft.”
Thereafter he bought everything she would sell him, sometimes going into debt to do so. They were the jewels in the crown of a collection of AfricanAmerican quilts that would number in the thousands.
Tompkins and Leon were an odd pair, both wilful, defensive and fragile. Each had survived a nervous breakdown or two; Rosie Lee’s, coming sometime in the late ’70s, deepened the spirituality and intensity of her work, making it more than ever a haven from the world. Eli’s first came early, after his wife of five years left him.
Leon believed Tompkins was a great artist and at one point made notes about illustrating an essay about her with works by Michelangelo, Mondrian and Picasso. The quilter felt she was an instrument of God and saw her work as an expression of her faith and his designs. “If people like my work,” she once told Leon, “that means the love of Jesus Christ is still shining through what I’m doing.”
Leon’s devotion to her work made him a supplicant, willing to do anything — bring her fabrics and art books — to help with her work. He also wanted to promote it, devising Rosie Lee Tompkins as her “art” name, to preserve her privacy.
His promotional efforts, however, did not involve much selling: Leon was almost congenitally incapable of parting with any of his quilts, or anything else, that he accumulated. But within a year, he began building a resumé of articles, exhibitions and lectures about the importance of African-American quilts, as well as their frequent emphasis on improvisation and their links to African textiles. In doing so, he contributed to the national awareness of quilts of all kinds by African-Americans, which have been increasingly studied and exhibited since around1980, thanks to the combined influences of the civil rights movement, feminism and multiculturalism.
Initially Tompkins seemed to belong to the first rank of outsider artists who began reshaping the American art canon around 1980, such geniuses as Martin Ramirez, Bill Traylor and Joseph Yoakum. Like Tompkins, they were artists of colour.
But the “self-taught” or “outsider” labels were inaccurate for quilters. Effie Mae Martin had grown up as her mother’s apprentice in a kind of atelier: a small town full of female friends and relatives who quilted, the older ones showing and telling the younger ones how it was done.
She reminded me of George Ohr, the unparalleled turn-ofthe-century potter from Biloxi, Miss., whose work was rediscovered in the early 1970s. They both possessed an extraordinary skill and idiosyncratic abandon that creates a new sense of the possibilities of the hand, visual wit and beauty in any medium.
As with Ohr, Tompkins’s work triggered a kind of joy on first encounter. You could hear it in the reviews of the 2002 Whitney Biennial, which Lawrence Rinder organized during his stint there as curator of contemporary art. He put three of her quilts in the show, one of which the Whitney acquired.
After a final decade that was a nearly vertical trajectory, hurtling toward art world fame, Rosie Lee Tompkins died suddenly, at 70, in December 2006, in her home.
Leon died on March 6, 2018, at 82, in an assisted-living home. Then, several months later, came the amazing news: He had bequeathed his entire quilt collection to the Berkeley Art Museum. The final count of the Eli Leon Bequest was 3,100 quilts by over 400 artists. Tompkins — represented by more than 680 quilts, quilt tops, appliqués, clothing and objects — is undoubtedly the star.
The bequest automatically transforms the Berkeley museum into an unparalleled centre for the study of African-American quilts.
There are many museum exhibitions on lockdown in the United States right now. They closed in one world and will reopen in a very different one, and the relevance of “Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective” has only expanded in the hiatus. Her work is simply further evidence of the towering AfricanAmerican achievements that permeate the culture of this country. A deeper understanding and knowledge of these, especially where art is concerned, must be part of the necessary rectification and healing that the U.S. faces.
Tompkins’ work is further evidence of the towering African-American achievements that permeate the culture of the U.S.