Carolyn Mazloomi: The Making on an Archive
Carolyn Mazloomi spent four decades collecting quilts. What she gathered is a documented history of Black American life, stitched rather than written, and now on show at Claire Oliver Gallery in Harlem until 8 August.
Masters of the Stitch: Threaded Stories draws entirely from Mazloomi's personal collection, parts of which have already entered the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the International Quilt Museum. As founder of the Women of Color Quilters Network, she has spent her career arguing that these textiles deserve a central place in American art history. This exhibition is her argument made visible.
Wendell Brown, The Family, 2024.
Wendell Brown's quilts anchor the show. His path into the medium began with a single encounter, standing before Faith Ringgold's Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro at the High Museum of Art. He later assisted Ringgold in New York and carried her influence back into his own studio in Columbia, South Carolina. There, Brown has spent three decades working through W.E.B. Du Bois's idea of the Veil of Double Consciousness, treating black fabric and layered iconography as a way to hold two ways of seeing at once. His quilts refuse to stay flat. They push into sculpture and installation, occupying real space rather than hanging quietly on a wall.
Sharon Kerry-Harlan, On the Face Of It, 2010.
Michael A. Cummings pulls kente and kuba cloth traditions into conversation with the improvisational force of jazz and hip-hop. Marion Coleman works the other way, favouring geometric precision to map interior and communal life through colour and structure. Carolyn Crump treats every seam as a site of political memory, while Sharon Kerry-Harlan turns personal narrative into abstract form.
Viola Leak, About Jazz, ca. 2006
Peggie Hartwell layers text over image until her quilts function as visual documents. Viola Burley-Leak draws on ancestral and spiritual lineage. Ed Johnetta Miller works loosely and boldly, in keeping with a long tradition of improvisation in African American quiltmaking. Clara Nartey bridges Ghanaian heritage with American experience, and Donna Chambers builds surfaces dense enough to reward long looking. Kathy Nida crowds her quilts with figures and incident, and Juanita Yeager treats fabric the way a painter treats canvas.
Donna Chambers, POTUS #44, 1998.
Across narrative appliqué, rust-dyeing, digital printing, and machine embroidery, these twelve artists share a single conviction: that cloth can hold what speech sometimes cannot. Migration, faith, resistance, grief, and joy all found their way into quilts long before they found their way into books, because a quilt could travel through a family and a community without ever needing to be read aloud.
Mazloomi's collection asks visitors to stop treating that history as folk curiosity. It asks them to look closer, and to recognise a body of work that has been doing serious artistic and historical labour all along.
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Further Information:
Masters of the Stitch: Threaded Stories is on now at Claire Oliver Gallery in Harlem until 8 August.
Image Credits:
Lead: Michael Cummings, Haitian Mermaid #2, 1996.
All images courtesy of the artists and Claire Oliver gallery.