The Incredible Story Behind the Largest African American Quilt Collection

After six years, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is finally shining a spotlight on the transformative gift of over 3,000 African American quilts it received from the late collector Eli Leon in 2019.

“I wanted to think deeply about the role of quilts as portable objects,” exhibition curator Elaine Yau told me. “When quiltmakers are migrating and leaving the South, quiltmaking as a
set of craft skills and technical skills is moving with them.”

There are more than 100 quilts from the collection now on view in the show “Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California“, representing the work of approximately 80 named artists. Roughly a quarter are from the South, made prior to 1950. The rest were made in the Bay Area.

Far more than a celebration of craft, the exhibition explores how African American quiltmaking traditions migrated from the South to the West during the mid-20th century, carried by women whose textiles were both sources of warmth and acts of self-expression. The exhibition also represents years of work for BAMPFA, which overnight became the nation’s largest repository of African American quilts following Leon’s bequest—a gift that came with the immense responsibility of preserving and presenting these works, and explaining to audiences how the histories of art, labor, and movement are stitched together.

Who Was Eli Leon? 

A psychologist and a gay white man who lived in Oakland, Eli Leon (1935–2018) was a unique figure. Described in his  obituary as “a highly discriminating hoarder,” Leon was a  passionate collector of knick knacks and antiques, such as the 30 meat grinders displayed in his kitchen.

He began collecting African American quilts, largely in the improvisational style—that is to say, created without a pattern in mind—in the 1970s. At the time, it was easy to find second-hand quilts at flea markets and thrift stores. Eventually, Leon amassed so many that he built a two-story climate-controlled annex to store his quilts, with the overflow stacked in piles up to two-feet high in the living room.

In 1989, Leon won a Guggenheim Fellowship to fund his quilt research, and bought a Winnebago to drive across the South, meeting with African American quiltmakers and taking meticulous notes about their work. He was dedicated to sharing this undersung textile art with the world, starting with the exhibition “Who’d a Thought It: Improvisation in African American Quiltmaking.” It debuted at the now-shuttered San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum in 1987 and toured to 25 institutions across the country.

Leon didn’t just collect historical quilts, but also the work of living quiltmakers, sometimes buying from them directly over a period of many years.

“In some cases, a patron and artist relationship would develop such that a quiltmaker would understand
the kind of taste that he had. And so there’s an interesting dimension to his story where the quiltmaking is shifting because of his collecting,” Yau said. “Some of the quilts in the collection may not have been used functionally and certainly had a thread—no pun intended—of art making entwined in them because of his role as a collector.”

Leon was the most invested in the work of Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006), a pseudonym he bestowed on the shy Effie Mae Howard, whom he met at an Oakland flea market in 1985. Over the next two decades, Leon bought every quilt she would sell him—more than 500 in total—sometimes even going into debt to pay for her latest masterpiece. In 2020, BAMPFA’s first show based on the Leon collection was the critically acclaimed “Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective.”

It was a piece by Tompkins in a 1996 exhibition of black-and-white quilts from Leon’s collection at the Richmond Art Center, north of Berkeley, that first caught the attention of Lawrence Rinder, a BAMPFA curator who would go on to become the institution’s director, retiring in 2019.

Rinder curated Tompkins’s first museum exhibition for BAMPFA in 1997. He also included her in the 2002 Whitney Biennial at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. But despite Rinder’s prominent role in promoting Tompkins, Leon never let on that he was planning to leave everything to BAMPFA.

A Gift With Strings Attached

Leon’s gift added a brand new dimension to the BAMPFA collection while increasing it by more than 15 percent. (The quilts are now nearly a fifth of the total holdings.) While it was thrilling to be the unexpected recipient of such largess, the collection was also nothing short of daunting.

The museum secured a $500,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation creating a curatorial position specifically to work with the new quilt collection. Yau, who was already a postdoc fellow at BAMPFA studying for her PhD in art history at UC Berkeley, was the perfect candidate. (She co-curated the Tompkins show and was promoted to associate curator and academic liaison in 2024.)

The first step was assessing the quilts’ condition: though there were few structural issues, there were some signs of mold and insect damage. Each and every quilt needed to undergo conservation treatment before entering storage. Each piece must be sealed in carbon dioxide chambers for five to seven weeks, vacuumed, and sanitized—an extensive process costing over $1.6 million. The effort was jeopardized in May when a $40,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant for the project was suddenly revoked due to federal budget cuts. (The non-profit quilt research organization the Quilt Index was similarly impacted.)

In an even bigger blow, the museum also lost $220,000 in unspent funds from the Institute for Museum and Library Services earmarked for the quilts’ conservation when the agency was essentially shut down earlier this year. BAMPFA has appealed the grants’ termination, and is fundraising to try and make up the shortfall. It also rejects the government’s claim that preserving the quilts “no longer serves the interest of the United States.”

“The quilts are in fact the heritage and representative of the rich cultural resources of this country,” Yau said. “What you have is the artistic production of everyday ordinary Americans, and the kinds of storytelling, community care, and creative ingenuity that the quilts represent are all values that a lot of people would would rally around.”

The goal is to finish conservation by 2028, but even after that, the quilts will require considerable care and resources.

Refolding the quilts every two years is ideal to prevent deep creases, according to Yau, but with their size and quantity, the task would require four staffers working some 533 hours—or about 76 days—making it a major undertaking. BAMPFA is assessing whether this is feasible given current staffing. Storage is also a challenge: unlike Leon’s compact home setup, museum standards require quilts to be folded with acid-free tissue and stored in boxes, which will necessitate renting additional space beyond BAMPFA’s existing facilities.

Unearthing a Story of Migration

Researching the collection has been a massive, at times overwhelming effort, as Leon never formally catalogued it. While inventorying the quilts in 2021, curator Yau identified around 500 makers and selected standout pieces for initial conservation and exhibition.

She described the experience of walking into the storage space and seeing the work of so many under-recognized makers for the first time as “sacred,” because “the quilts that you’re seeing are the surviving remnants and connections to a life and a name that we might not otherwise know about.” (The catalogue includes photographs and biographies of the show’s quiltmakers.)

Migration soon emerged as a unifying factor among many of the quiltmakers, who had moved to the Bay Area from the South in the mid 20th century.

Yau was able to track down three living quiltmakers in “Routed West,” and is prioritizing identifying the relatives of other artists now represented in the museum’s collection. She was especially thrilled to bring together three generations of quiltmakers at the opening of the show, which featured works by Laverne Brackens, her daughter Sherry Byrd and granddaughter Bara Byrd-Stewart, as well as Brackens’s late mother, Gladys Durham-Henry.

Yau also connected with, Ophenia Parker, the granddaughter of the late Arbie Williams, one of the artists in Leon’s collection, and now a local quiltmaker herself who loaned a work to the show.

The museum has partnered with the African American Quilt Documentation Study Group Archive and Database, a nonprofit led by A’Donna Richardson that is documenting and preserving African American quilt history, to host days for the community to bring in their family quilts for study. Similar work is being done by groups like the Quilt Alliance and Quilt American Study Group, but Richardson saw a need to focus specifically on African American quilts.

“So much of the racial inequities and segregation of this country were replicated in the quilt world. And so A’Donna talks very eloquently about why her organization
is really stepping in to fill that need,” Yau said. “In the quilt world, these racialized lines still need to be reckoned with for the work to move forward.”

Are Quilts Art? 

Though there is a long history of quiltmaking in the U.S., dating back to the colonial era, quilts have been often been seen only as functional objects—as cherished family heirlooms, as historical artifacts, as women’s work, or as home decor, not art. Increasingly, however, many art museums and galleries are foregrounding the artistic merits of the textile practice.

The best-known example is probably the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, a community of Black Alabama women that has become known for its vibrant geometric quilts. (A stunning display was among the highlights at New York’s Armory Show last month; the Whitney had a big show back in 2002, the same year Tompkins was in the biennial.)

Quilts were historically made by women, often during social gatherings where experienced quiltmakers would pass along their skills to the next generation. Quiltmaking has long been a form of creative reuse, an often communal practice fueled by thriftiness. It is also linked to the history of enslavement, quilts made out of salvaged scraps by a community with few resources at its disposal.

A quilt typically has three layers; the top layer with the piece-worked pattern, the insulated middle layer, and the back layer, quilted together with lines of decorative stitching. Leon would also collect finished top layers and hire other quiltmakers to complete them, such as Johnnie Wade, Willia Ette Graham, and Irene Bankhead, who finished hundreds of quilts by other artists for him.

The show illustrates a wide range of quilting techniques, like the neat layered concentric squares of the folded log cabin; the simple grid of the pinwheel, made from repeated half-square triangles, and, in the most show-stopping moment, the interlocking hoops of the double wedding ring, with an entire 1970s-era bedroom installation Leon purchased from Oakland quiltmaker Isiadore Whitehead.

While there’s lots of cotton, you’ll also spot velvet, corduroy, wool, flannel polyester, and rayon, among other fabrics. There is a simple design that Louise Hicks likely made from flour sacks around the year 1939 to Gerstine Scott’s maximalist 1989 quilt made entirely from men’s neckties, a recreation of one of her grandmother Laura Hall’s creations. (Some of the labels include small touchable samples replicating different textures, in acknowledgment of the perfectly understandable desire to interact with the quilts on a tactile level.)

Another highlight is a blue and white puff quilt, pieced from tobacco sacks sewn in puffy rectangles by Annie Crawford in Call, Texas, in the 1930s.

“There’s so much wisdom in how patchwork quilts come together, and I think people are really responding to these themes of creative reuse, of wanting to connect with their ancestry, and of being able to have a creative practice,” Yau said.

The show almost seems to vibrate with creative energy, these handmade textiles still infused with the love and care of their makers decades after their creation. The author Alice Walker once owned of the quilts in the show, pieced by Tompkins and quilted by Bankhead.

“I get under that quilt and I just feel real snazzy,” she is quoted in the museum wall label. “I can’t be depressed but so long, lying under that.”

A Living History

“Routed West,” with its stunning quilts made in the Bay Area, raises the question of how many other thriving Black quiltmaking communities across the country remain unrecognized.

“I don’t think the research has really been done, in terms of having a methodical or scholarly approach to trying to document the presence and concentration of African American-made quilts in other places,” Yau said.
”And because the nature of quiltmaking as a family-based, community-based practice in both the making and in the circulation of quilts, it’s harder to track than say, the presence of abstract painters.”

“There’s a larger story and larger history of African American people coming together to make quilts that is yet to be fully made known,” she added.

BAMPFA plans to tour “Routed West” with the Art Bridges Foundation, and hopes to work with other museums more broadly.

The stories told in “Routed West” are also ongoing. There are still thriving communities of quiltmakers around the country, many of them active in African American quilt guilds or organizations like artist Carolyn Mazloomi’s Women of Color Quilters Network.

The show also includes quilts from outside the collection made after 1980, on loan from local quiltmakers from the African American Quilt Guild of Oakland, to celebrate how the quiltmaking tradition is still going strong.

“Quiltmaking really is a living tradition,” Yau said. “People can begin learning right now.”

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com