The Brooklyn Rail

Patterns in Abstraction is a permanent-collection exhibition presenting textile artworks from Black female artists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries curated to answer a question: “How can quilts made by Black women change the way we tell the history of abstract art?” The exhibition, full of exemplary and dazzling masterpieces, is the product of a convening of quilters, curators, and academics, hosted at the High Museum in May 2023. When asked to respond to the central question, these thought leaders provided keen and revolutionary responses, calling for complete reevaluation of the history of abstract art—responses which this exhibition failed to adopt entirely. The result is an exhibition that stuns in its aesthetic prowess but is conceptually underwhelming.

The exhibition presents sixteen quilts, some attributed to known quilters like Louisiana Bendolph and Lucy T. Pettway though the majority are attributed to “Maker Once Known.” Every piece is a testament to the enduring strength of quilts as a visually intoxicating and technically complex medium. Given the relatively limited scope of the exhibition, the range of expression on display is expansive. O.V. Brantley’s A Star Among Stars (2017–20) is a prime example of the adept hands required for quilting. This quilt uses the English Paper piecing technique, which required hand-piecing about three thousand shapes to form the quilt top. The result of such intricate piecework is a fractal-like design of colliding and nested star shapes, seen in Brantley’s quilt in a monochrome red palette. Set against a stark white background, the quilt roils like carmine viscera.

Red reappears in Untitled (ca. 1940s), albeit with a different character. Exemplifying the widely used quilting style, Housetop—a quilt composition anchored by a square medallion of vertical and horizontal strips—Untitled, rather than build out from one central medallion, has duplicated the shape continuously, filling the quilt with a grid-like pattern. As opposed to the exacting precision of A Star Among Stars, Untitled is rife with oblong, irregular shapes of multiple materials conjoined with chaotic sequencing. The quilt, despite its underlying structure of Housetops, feels improvisational and spur-of-the-moment, an impression that brings understanding to how quilts and abstract painting have come to be conflated. And maybe this impromptu feeling is because it was indeed made that way. As the exhibition text illuminates, “Housetops … could be made iteratively as fabric was available.” Regardless of the exact conditions of its creation, Untitled serves as a wonderful counterpoint to A Star Among Stars, showing how one medium can have such drastically different emotive and visual executions.

If the curatorial intent of the exhibition had been to present miraculous quilts from the High’s collection, it would have been a success. Instead, this exhibition—admirably so—goes further by exploring the fraught relationship between quilting and abstract painting, wherein lies the rub. Exhibiting quilts as artworks rather than household textiles requires the creation of an entirely new artistic history, narrative, and vocabulary. Divorced of their original contexts as functional objects and placed in a new, purely aesthetic context, these quilts become objects of discrete contemplation, a kind of reverence that is both transformative and much needed, but the grasping to define this new context is not without complications. The exhibition text states, “Although the color-rich geometric patchwork of quilts is visually resonant with examples of abstract painting often credited as pinnacles of artistic innovation, many have argued that such comparisons fail to honor the integrity of quilts within their distinct conditions of production.” This passive assertion suggests that couching quilts within the history of abstract painting fails to address the peculiarities of the medium and, by extension, that which differentiates it. During the convention at the High in 2023, the speakers, some of whom are represented in this exhibition, presented a different case.

Marquetta Johnson, an artist whose work is on display in this exhibition, said:

Some might think of abstract art as colorful surfaces assembled in a certain order, created in a free and seemingly random way to express and evoke feelings rather than provide a narrative. Many quilts made by Black women during the eighteenth through the twenty-first century can be described in a similar manner.

Another participant, Dawn Williams Boyd, whose work is in the High’s collection but not on display in this exhibition, said:

Abstract art, like everything else, was invented on the African continent and disseminated throughout the world by the migration of African peoples. African Adinkra cloth, Bogolanfini cloth (known in the West as mud cloth), African raffia cloth, Tibetan beadwork, Navajo blanket weaving, and Islamic geometric designs, to name a few, are examples of abstract art that have existed for centuries.

These quilters state quite plainly that modes of abstraction have existed, both within quilting and outside of it, long before the Western notion of abstraction was conceived, and yet, the exhibition, which came a year after the convening, still presents quilting as interrelated with Western abstraction. Asking for these experts’ opinions and then failing to frame quilting and abstraction as longstanding practices independent of Western ideologies makes the inclusion of their voices performative and gratuitous. Questioning whether quilting should be regarded as a form of abstract art is correct to a certain degree but does not wholly address the kinds of revision needed. Continuing to address quilts within an appropriative art movement perpetuates the subjugation of the medium. The question should not be, "How can quilts change the way we look at abstract painting?" rather it should be, “How can quilting abolish the idea that abstraction was invented in the early 1900s?"