Art I'm Looking At: Quilts at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Over the past weekend, I stopped in at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive to see the main show on now – a show of quilts by black Americans called "Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California." The show, which runs through November 30, looks at quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration of black Americans out of the South (1940-1970) in search of work and better treatment than they were accustomed to in the South. It comprises about one hundred quilts either made in the South and transported to California through migration or made in California by migrants to the state from the South. It is the first show that draws on a large collection of quilts donated to the museum in 2019 by a life-long collector. 

The earliest pieces in the show were made by women born into slavery. The most recent pieces were made by artists still living. The range of styles is diverse. Some exhibit the careful piecing, geometric formality, and intricate stitching that characterize the quilting traditions with which I'm more familiar but others display a much freer approach to materials and composition, notably a willingness (or often a need) to draw on materials at hand; there are quilts that incorporate old denim, old T-shirts, entire pieces of used clothing (one artist in the show appears to have been known for making "britches quilts" using overalls and other articles of clothing intact), neckties, and scrap fabric of all kinds. The inventiveness and beauty of some of the pieces is impressive. Well worth a look. I've attached photos here of some of my favorite pieces in the show.