'Routed West' at BAMPFA reframes the story of Black quilt making in America

Jun 08, 2025

Will you chip in to support our nonprofit newsroom with a donation today?

Earlier this year, the Trump administration revoked more than $260,000 of federal grants it had made to BAMPFA to preserve and exhibit its prized African American quilt collection, accusing the museum of “anti-American programming.” Rather than retreat, BAMPFA has responded with one of the most ambitious undertakings in its history, a show that celebrates African American textile traditions and the ingenuity of their makers.

This landmark project began in 2019 with the transformative bequest of more than 3,000 quilts from collector Eli Leon—widely regarded as the most significant archive of African American quilts in the world. What followed was a complex, multi-year process of inventory, conservation, research, community engagement, and reparative initiatives. Embracing its role as a cultural steward, BAMPFA is committed to honoring an art form that has long been marginalized in mainstream art history.

The exhibition, Routed West, features 100 quilts by approximately 80 makers — primarily Black women, many with ties to the Bay Area — asserting their work not merely as craft, but as profound artistic expression. These textiles transmit memory and emotion across generations and geographies, embodying both personal and collective histories.

Unfolding the layered story of African American quilt making, Routed West underscores the vital role quilts have played in Black life — expressed through diverse styles and techniques. Some quilts have endured for decades and span generations, initiated by one maker and completed by another. Alice Neal’s Untitled, 1918, began with an unfinished top made by her grandmother, Jane Traylor. Her exquisite portrait quilt memorializes her mother, Mary Bright. As such, these quilts serve as intergenerational collaborations — objects that transcend time, space, and even singular authorship.

The exhibition’s cultural backdrop is the Second Great Migration (1940–1970), when African Americans left the South seeking opportunity and refuge from Jim Crow laws. Alongside them traveled quilting traditions that functioned both as practical household items and powerful cultural touchstones. Through themes of memory, kinship, resistance, and creativity, these works bear witness to lives lived, journeys taken, and legacies passed on. Though shaped by displacement, they affirm how culture remains rooted, even amid the upheaval of the Black diaspora.

The quilt makers represented here came from all walks of life — teachers, nurses, farmers, bus drivers, laundry workers, and store clerks. Most were makers rather than self-identified artists, with practices grounded in care, love, and the spirit of sharing.

One such maker, Isiadore Whitehead, was born in Arkansas and later, when she was in her mid-30s, settled in Oakland with her husband, a welder, and their two children. Though she worked as a nurse and school bus driver, Whitehead had learned to quilt in childhood. In her home, quilting became more than a pastime — it was a way to transform her home into a profoundly personal, handmade environment. She outfitted the guest bedroom entirely in her own quilts — on the bed, as cushions, curtains, and even rugs — reflecting her creativity, her pride in her work, and her devotion.

Where Eli Leon once narrowly defined the visual language of African American quilt making as primarily asymmetrical and improvisational, Routed West reevaluates and expands upon these earlier categorizations. The exhibition challenges Leon’s reductive “race style” framework by presenting quilts as varied and nuanced as the individuals who made them. From Gertistine Scott’s Necktie Quilt to contemporary works by members of the African American Quilt Guild of Oakland, the show resists essentialism in favor of multiplicity. For curator Elaine Yau, it was vital that today’s tradition bearers be given space. Their quilts are not only visual legacies; they are declarations of presence, persistence, and cultural legacy.

For Ora Clay, who joined the Guild after retiring from her work as a librarian, quilts are a way to ground and contextualize historical memory. “We have a duty to tell our stories,” she told Berkeleyside. Her quilt commemorating Brown v. Board of Education, while not in this exhibition, exemplifies her archival approach: it incorporates the names of plaintiffs and attorneys using a traditional “courthouse steps” pattern. The piece now resides in the Smithsonian.

We have a duty to tell our stories.

For Routed West, Clay turned inward to reflect a personal story. She repurposed a functional quilt made by her mother, Minner Lampley — stitched from outgrown clothes that she’d carried with her for warmth when she migrated to California in 1962. The result, My Migration (2025), tells the story of her journey out of the South aboard a Pullman train. In transforming a domestic object into a narrative artwork, Clay collapses generational time, infusing the quilt with both personal and historical resonance.

Hanging beside her quilt is a work by her daughter, Niambi Clay, titled Education’s Promise. Inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, Niambi reimagines the African American educational narrative. Where Lawrence depicted girls chalking arithmetic on a blackboard, Niambi’s figures inscribe the systemic challenges Black students face in California today. The result is a poignant intergenerational dialogue that links past aspirations to present-day realities.

Together, these quilts are powerful cultural documents — testaments to resilience, creativity, and the pursuit of justice. They trace the quilt’s evolution from domestic objects to fine art, from family heirloom to public record.

In an era marked by political backlash against DEI efforts and federal divestment from cultural institutions, Routed West feels both urgent and defiant. The quilts gathered here are not only acts of resistance — they are vibrant expressions of survival. Speaking across time, they challenge us to consider how culture endures in the face of erasure and how stories — stitched by hand — carry forward memory, meaning, and hope. They ask us to consider what cultural survival looks like under a political siege.

"*" indicates required fields

Δ