February 1, 2007

Rosie Lee Tompkins’ quilts“Half-Squares Put-Together;” (left) and “Half-Squares”; the quilts are among several now showing in “Approximate Measure,” an African-American quilt exhibit at the Shirley/Jones Gallery.

By Lauren Heaton

Irregular triangles in fuscia, black and paisley jump around one of Rosie Lee Tompkins’s quilts in a way some art critics think jazz would look like if jazz were made of textiles. The velvet patterns harken back to an African tradition, except that these patterns, more free-form with a shot of white here and a zing of yellow there, suggest that the artist, an African-American quilter from Texas, is creating something entirely new.

Tompkins’s work and that of six other quilters are featured in “Approximate Measure: Improvisation in African-American Quilts” showing at the Shirley/Jones Gallery from now until March 10. Nothing could be more celebratory of Black History Month than these colorful and highly textured creations whose African heritage has been infused with Amercan energy.

The heritage of poverty that led women to sew together scraps of fabric from old clothes and drapes brings one layer of meaning to these quilts, said gallery co-owner Karen Shirley. And the common use of triangles, bars and irregular rectangles reminiscent of Kente cloth from the Asante people of Ghana and the Ivory Coast and the bark cloth of the Congolese Kuba people distinguishes these works from the American quilting tradition, she said. But according to art historian Eli Leon, the “improvisational piecing” in Tompkins’s work brings new energy to the African-American quilting tradition.

“Ultimately, Tompkins’s expectation-shattering color composition, authoritative style, simplicity in complexity, consummate integrity, and soul-to-soul delivery of emotional truth defy classification,” Leon wrote as an introduction to Tompkins’ 1997 solo exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum.

Tompkins’s quilts have been likened to the work of other African-American quilters from Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas and California, Shirley said. These works represent a tradition slightly apart from that of the Gees Bend, Alabama quilters, whose work has been exhibited nationally. Both traditions are “highly rhythmic” improvisational quilting styles, and if the Gees Bend work is said to be the blues, Shirley said, then this collection could be called jazz. However, when Tompkins was asked what music she liked to listen to while she worked, she named the disco soundtrack of the film Saturday Night Fever, according to art historian Lawrence Rinder.

Most of the quilts in “Approximate Measure” were made after 1990 and span four generations of quiltmakers, including four women in one family whose tradition was passed from mother to daughter. The bars in Gladys Henry’s “Strip” quilt can be seen in the repeating rectangular strips in the “Medallion” series made by her daughter, Laverne Brackens, who lives near her mother in Fairfield, Texas. Brackens’ daughter Sherry Byrd, who migrated to Richmond, Calif., incorporates a variation on her family’s signature bars in her quilt “Strip Medallion,” and the quilt of her daughter, Bara Byrd, can be seen as a crossroads of all the traditions that came before her.

Several other lyrical and intensely colored quilts by Willia Ette Graham and Irene Bankhead, both from Oakland, Calif., are also represented in this show.

The work of Tompkins, who died in 2000 at the age of 70, has been seen in nationally touring solo and group exhibitions of African-American quilts. Her quilt “Half-Squares” was recognized as “best painting in the exhibition” by the New York Times’ review of the Biennial exhibit at the Whitney Museum in New York. Works by Tompkins that appear in “Approximate Measure” include “Half-Squares,” “Half-Squares Put-Together,” and “Three Sixes.”

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com