The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s latest exhibit honors Black Southern quilters. Having originated at the Mississippi Museum of Art (MMA) in Jackson, Mississippi, “Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South” will feature highlights from MMA’s and American photographer and collector Roland L. Freeman’s collection of handmade and machine-stitched quilts.
As a documentarian, Freeman recognized these quilters as artists. “He was working in a context where a lot of Black women quilters were not appropriately identified or given credit for the work that they were doing,” says Brooks’ chief curator Patricia Daigle.
Overlooked due to race, gender, and class, these makers and their quilts had been left to the wayside, their art unrecognized as such for decades. “Quilts aren’t typically shown as often as the traditional style of paintings or sculptures are in the museum setting,” site curator Kristin Pedrozo explains. “It is a craft form, and it is one of those craft forms that are extremely labor-intensive and have a lot of intentionality behind them, and are, on all levels, a form of artistry.”
For this show, each maker or each community that’s made a quilt has been accounted for, and each of the 17 quilts is proudly displayed as art, allowed to take up space.
“Quilts get passed down, so there’s this really beautiful generational handing-down of these objects. But I think they can also be appreciated as works of art,” Daigle says, “and I think the public and the museum-goers and the museum world are coming to the realization that there’s a great deal of skill and artistry that goes into crafting and making these objects, just like you would any other art form. But it really does open up potential for so many stories to be shared as well. As a medium, inherently, it can really tap into a lot of really rich stories — family stories, history, civil rights.”
“Our iteration of this exhibition … [also] ties it back to our Memphis community,” Pedrozo says. “Memphis is definitely no stranger to [the quilting] tradition.”
Indeed, among those 17 quilters on display is the late Memphian Mayfair “Mary” Matthews. “On of my memories of my mom is hearing her say she wanted to become a big-time artist,” says her daughter Rosemary Marr. “This is her being a big-time artist.”
“Of Salt & Spirit” also includes interactive activities including the opportunity to share images of your own family quilts and to participate in the making of a communal quilt.