10 AR THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2020Art
In 1997, I walked into the Berkeley Art Mu-
seum to be greeted by a staggering sight:
an array of some 20 quilts unlike any I had
ever seen. Their unbridled colors, irregular
shapes and nearly reckless range of textiles
telegraphed a tremendous energy and the
implacable ambition, and confidence, of
great art.
They were crafted objects that tran-
scended quilting, with the power of paint-
ing. This made them canon-busting, and im-
plicitly subversive. They gave off a tangible
heat. I left in a state of shock — I knew I had
been instantly converted but I didn’t yet
know to what.
In memory the show became a jubilant
fugue of small squares of velvet in deep
gemstone hues, dancing with not much ap-
parent order yet impeccably arranged for
full effect. My first thought was of Paul Klee,
that kind of love-at-first-sight allure, seduc-
tive hand-madeness and unfiltered accessi-
bility, only bigger and stronger.
The planets had aligned: I’d happened on
the first solo show anywhere of Rosie Lee
Tompkins, an exemplar of one of the coun-
try’s premier visual traditions: African-
American improvisational quilt-making —
an especially innovative branch of a medi-
um that reaches back to African textiles and
continues to thrive.
Tompkins’s work, I came to realize, was
one of the century’s major artistic accom-
plishments, giving quilt-making a radical
new articulation and emotional urgency. I
felt I had been given a new standard against
which to measure contemporary art.
Rosie Lee Tompkins was a pseudonym, I
would learn, adopted by a fiercely private,
deeply religious woman, who as her work
received more and more attention, was al-
most never photographed or interviewed.
She was born Effie Mae Martin in rural
Gould, Ark., on Sept. 9, 1936. At the time of
the show, she was 61 and living in nearby
Richmond, Calif., just north of Berkeley.
Over the years, I would be repeatedly
blown away by work that was at once rig-
orous and inclusive. Tompkins was an in-
ventive colorist whose generous use of
black added to the gravity of her efforts. She
worked in several styles and all kinds of fab-
rics, using velvets — printed, panne,
crushed — to gorgeous effect, in ways that
rivaled oil paint. But she was also adept
with denim, faux furs, distressed T-shirts
and fabrics printed with the faces of the
Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jr.
and Magic Johnson.
A typical Tompkins quilt had an original,
irresistible aliveness. One of her narrative
works was 14 feet across, the size of small
billboard. It appropriated whole dish towels
printed with folkloric scenes, parts of a feed
sack and, most prominently, bright bold
chunks of the American flag. What else?
Bits of embroidery, Mexican textiles, fab-rics printed with flamenco dancers and rac-
ing cars, hot pink batik and, front and cen-
ter, a slightly cheesy manufactured tap-
estry of Jesus Christ. It seemed like a map
of the melting pot of American culture and
politics.
While works like this one relate to Pop
Art, others had the power of abstraction.
One of her signature velvets might be de-
scribed as a “failed checkerboard.” Its little
squares of black and dark green, lime and
blue, slide continuously in and out of regis-
ter, creating the illusion of ceaseless motion,
like a fractal model of rippling water.
This surface action, I discovered, re-
flected her constant improvisation: Tomp-
kins began by cutting her squares (or trian-
gles or bars) freehand, never measuring or
using a template, and intuitively changed
the colors, shapes and size of her fabric
fragments, making her compositions seem
to expand or contract. As a result her quilts
could be deliriously akimbo, imbued with a
mesmerizing pull of differences and incon-
sistencies that communicates impassioned
attention and care.
“I think it’s because I love them so much
that God let me see all these different col-
ors,” Tompkins once said of her patchworks.
“I hope they spread a lot of love.”
That 1997 Berkeley show was my first
Rosie Lee Tompkins moment. Organized by
Lawrence Rinder, the museum’s chief cura-
tor, it helped boost her reputation beyond
the quilt world centered in and around San
Francisco. This September many more peo-
ple will have similar moments of their own,and feel the love implicit in her extraordi-
nary achievement, when “Rosie Lee Tomp-
kins: A Retrospective” — the artist’s largest
show yet — opens its doors once more at the
Berkeley Art Museum for a run through
Dec. 20. (It debuted briefly in February be-
fore the coronavirus lockdown.) The muse-
um’s website currently offers a robust on-
line display and 70-minute virtual tour.
This exhibition, again organized by Mr.
Rinder, the museum’s director until March,
with Elaine Y. Yau, a postdoctoral curatorial
fellow, marks the end of a 35-year saga.
Though it began with Effie Mae Martin, it
came to include a small, nervous collector
named Eli Leon, who met her in 1985, fell in
love with her quilts and those of many other
African-American creators in and around
Richmond — and devoted half his life to ac-
quiring and studying, exhibiting and writ-
ing about their work.The Saga of Effie and Eli and Rosie Lee
Rosie Lee Tompkins grew up the eldest of 15
half siblings, picking cotton and piecing
quilts for her mother. In 1958 she joined the
postwar phase of the Great Migration, relo-
cating to Milwaukee and then Chicago,
eventually settling in Richmond, Calif., a
busy port and shipyard that had become a
destination for thousands of African-Ameri-
cans who moved out of the South, many
bringing with them singular aspects of ru-
ral culture.
She studied nursing, and for the next two
decades or so worked in convalescent
homes, a job she is said to have loved. Dur-
ing this time she married and divorced Ellis
Howard, raised five children and stepchil-
dren and started to make quilts to sell at the
area’s many flea markets, along with other
wares. She even had a printed business
card that offered “Crazy Quilts and Pillows
All Sizes.” By the late 1970s, according to the
current exhibition’s catalog, she was earn-
ing as much as $400 a weekend from sales
and was able to quit her nursing job.
The flea markets were a quilter’s para-
dise in the 1970s, ’80s and beyond, places
where the necessary materials were plenti-
ful and cheap: printed, embroidered and se-
quined fabrics, beaded trim, crocheted
doilies, needlepoint, buttons, secondhand
clothing, costume jewelry — all of which,
and more, Tompkins incorporated into her
art.
The area was also paradise for quilt col-
lectors, one of whom was Eli, born in the
Bronx in 1935 and trained as a psychologist,
whose collecting instincts verged on hoard-
ing. Eli had also worked as a graphic de-
signer and sometime in the late 1970s, after
years of haunting the area’s flea markets
and yard sales for whatever appealed, he
zeroed in on the visual vibrancy of quilts,
evolving into a self-taught scholar. He lived
frugally in a small bungalow in Oakland
that was eventually packed to its rafters
with quilts, except for his dining room and
kitchen. These were menageries of previ-
ous flea-market obsessions, artifacts of be-
tween-the-wars popular culture — crafts,
milk glass, dolls, cookie tins, but also meatThe Genius of Rosie Lee Tompkins
A stunning show confirms
the quilter’s status as one
of the great American artists.
By ROBERTA SMITHUC BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM
ARCHIVE, ELI LEON BEQUEST; BEN BLACKWELLJOHNNA ARNOLD/IMPART PHOTOGRAPHYMore wall-hanging or
even street mural than
quilt, this work from
around 1996, above,
juxtaposes images of
black athletes and
political leaders with
crosses made of silk
men’s ties to evoke the
complexities of
succeeding while black
in America. Below, in
“Rosie Lee Tompkins:
A Retrospective” at the
Berkeley Art Museum, a
quilt made mostly of
double knit polyester (far
left) holds its own against
a quilt with a similar
“house” motif in various
kinds of velvet.