Quilting has played a significant role in the history of Black American folk art and American folk art as a whole. Tracy L. Vaughn-Manley, Betty Joy Bonds of Chicago, and Melissa Blount of Evanston, known as “sister quilters,” have used quilting as a way to represent protection, warmth, creativity, and community within the Black American community.
The Dittmar Gallery will be showcasing “Radiant Compositions II,” a collection of quilts by Vaughn-Manley, Bonds, and Blount, from January 12 to March 4, 2023, at the Norris University Center on the Evanston campus. These quilts stand out due to the non-traditional materials and improvised methods used in their creation.
“To look at a quilt today is to behold history. Individual quilts have long been sought out as relics of a family’s life over time,” said Vaughn-Manley, an assistant professor in the African American Studies department at Northwestern.
“Quilts are more and more frequently being presented in museums and exhibition spaces as high art. In this context, the quilts are no longer useful, intimate bed coverings but are rather transformed into objects that invite one to reflect on their beauty and the ways in which quilts are also representative of American cultural expression overall.”
Tracy Vaughn-Manley is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her current research examines the ways in which the defining aspects of the Black Aesthetic quilting tradition, including the assertion of individual and collective agency, the narrative elements, and the social and historical significance of quilts, make quilting a convenient trope for many Black women writers, such as novelists Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Terri McMillian, poets Nikki Giovanni and Lucille Clifton, and playwright Lynn Nottage.
There will be an opening reception on Thursday, January 12 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Dittmar Gallery, where visitors can meet the quilters.
The gallery is free to the public and open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, except when a new exhibition is being installed.
Learn more in Northwestern Now’s story, “Dittmar Gallery exhibits quilts by Northwestern professor and ‘quilting sisters.’”