THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2020 AR 11Art
grinders, toasters and enamel saucepans —
mostly in the jade greens.
Around 1980, Eli turned his gimlet eye to
searching out African-American quilts and
interviewing their makers. At flea markets
he would approach anyone selling anything
to ask if they knew of quilts for sale. One day
he asked a woman selling kitchen utensils
— Effie Mae Howard. He would later write,
“She was evasive, but eventually let on that
she herself dabbled in the craft.”
Thereafter he bought everything she
would sell him, sometimes going into debt
to do so. They were the jewels in the crown
of a collection of African-American quilts
that would eventually number in the
thousands.
Rosie Lee and Eli were an odd pair, both
willful, defensive and fragile. Each had sur-
vived a nervous breakdown or two; Rosie
Lee’s, coming sometime in the late ’70s,
deepened the spirituality and intensity of
her work, making it more than ever a haven
from the world. Eli’s first came early, after
his wife of five years left him. (They had met
as students at Reed College and married,
even though they both knew he was gay.)
Eli believed Rosie Lee was a great artist
and at one point made notes about illustrat-
ing an essay about her with works by Mi-
chelangelo, Mondrian and Picasso. The
quilter felt she was an instrument of God
and saw her work as an expression of her
faith and his designs. “If people like my
work,” she once told Eli, “that means the
love of Jesus Christ is still shining through
what I’m doing.”
In photographs, Rosie Lee looks tall, of re-
gal posture. Eli’s devotion to her work made
him a supplicant, willing to do anything —
bring her fabrics and art books — to help
with her work. He also wanted to promote it,
devising Rosie Lee Tompkins as her “art”
name, to preserve her privacy. Some people
thought she might not exist, that Eli had
made the quilts himself.
His promotional efforts, however, did not
involve much selling: Eli was almost con-
genitally incapable of parting with any of
his quilts, or anything else, that he accumu-
lated. But within a year he began building a
résumé of articles, exhibitions and lectures
about the importance of African-American
quilts as well as their frequent emphasis on
improvisation and their links to African tex-
tiles. In doing so, he contributed to the na-
tional awareness of quilts of all kinds by
African-Americans, which have been in-
creasingly studied and exhibited since
around 1980, thanks to the combined influ-
ences of the civil rights movement, femi-
nism and multiculturalism.
His 1987 show, “Who’d a Thought It:
Improvisation in African-American Quilt-
making,” included a catalog essay by the
well-known Africanist Robert Ferris
Thompson alongside his own. It opened at
the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Mu-
seum in 1987 and, over the next decade,
toured to 25 museums — including the
American Craft Museum in New York City
in 1989. (It was written about in the Home
section of The New York Times, but signifi-
cantly not in the Art pages.)
Eli made three trips to the South — on a
Guggenheim grant in one instance — to
meet the relatives of quilters he knew and
collected around Oakland. In Arkansas, he
visited Rosie Lee’s mother, Sadie Lee Dale,
and bought one of her quilts, too.
Mr. Rinder’s Rosie Lee Tompkins conver-
sion took place in a show of black and white
quilts by African-Americans that Eli orga-
nized in 1996 at the Richmond Art Center.
The textile of hers that jumped out at Mr.
Rinder is impressive even in photographs.Made from a family of velvets, it resembles
Op-Art, only softer, less mechanical and al-
together more appealing.
Eager for more information about the art-
ist, Mr. Rinder called up Eli, who re-
sponded: “You like that piece? You should
see what she does with color!”Rosie Lee Tompkins: Beyond Labels
Though I never met Tompkins, her quilts
became stuck in my mind, sometimes at the
forefront, sometimes in a corner. I men-
tioned her work in my writing when I could.
Initially she seemed to belong to the first
rank of outsider artists who began reshap-
ing the American art canon around 1980,
such geniuses as Martín Ramírez, Bill Tray-
lor and Joseph Yoakum. Like Rosie Lee,
they were artists of color. (Others, like
Henry Darger and James Castle, were
white.) She was the only female artist I
knew who seemed of their stature — per-
haps beyond it — which was doubly exhila-
rating.
But the “self-taught” or “outsider” labels
were inaccurate for quilters. Effie Mae Mar-
tin had grown up as her mother’s appren-
tice in a kind of atelier: a small town full of
female friends and relatives who quilted,
the older ones showing and telling the
younger ones how it was done. More and
more I saw her as a great American artist,
no qualifier needed.
She reminded me of George Ohr, the
unparalleled turn-of-the-century potter
from Biloxi, Miss., whose his work was re-
discovered in the early 1970s. Ohr’s precari-
ously thin-walled vessels, unlikely shapes
and inspired glazing shared a kind of bravu-
ra with Tompkins’s works. They both pos-
sessed an extraordinary skill and idiosyn-
cratic abandon that creates a new sense of
the possibilities of the hand, visual wit andbeauty in any medium.
As with Ohr, Tompkins’s work triggered a
kind of joy on first encounter. You could hear
it in the reviews of the 2002 Whitney Bienni-
al, which Mr. Rinder organized during his
stint there as curator of contemporary art.
He put three of her quilts in the show, one of
which the Whitney acquired.
After a final decade that was a nearly ver-
tical trajectory, hurtling toward art world
fame, Rosie Lee Tompkins died suddenly, at
70, in December 2006, in her home. There
were obituaries in The New York Times,
The Los Angeles Times, The Washington
Post, The San Francisco Chronicle and The
Boston Globe.
Then, in 2013, Eli began to leave me ur-
gent phone messages: “You have to come
out here. I need help,” his thin reedy voicesaid. He had received a diagnosis of demen-
tia, and was worried about what would be-
come of his collection, which he wanted to
keep intact. It was overflowing not only his
house, but also a small, climate-controlled
annex he had built behind it.
I visited him that fall, to be stunned all
over again when Eli and Jenny Hurth — his
exemplary friend, assistant, fellow quilt-
lover and, after 2011, his most constant care-
giver — unveiled a succession of Tompkins
velvets, clipping them to the molding above
the double doors between his living and din-
ing rooms. I listened as Eli spoke about
Tompkins, her life and work, and also his.
(Eli was not shy about his considerable bril-
liance.) Wedging myself into the narrow
gaps between the shelves of folded quilts in
the annex, I got an inkling of how much I
hadn’t seen.
With this visit, I joined a scattered group
of individuals who had been seduced by
Eli’s dedication but mainly by his collection,
and were now concerned for its fate. In ad-
dition to Mr. Rinder and Ms. Hurth, it in-
cluded Elsa Longhauser, then director of
the Santa Monica Museum of Art (recently
renamed the Institute of Contemporary Art,
Los Angeles).
No one quite knew the actual size of his
holdings — Eli provided only the vaguest of
numbers when asked — but it seemed im-
mense, judging from the two- and three-
foot-high stacks of quilts that had to be navi-
gated to get through his darkened living
room.
I saw Eli once more, in 2016, when I went
to Berkeley to review the inauguration of
the museum’s new building. His dementia
was much further along, but he smiled as
Ms. Hurth introduced me to another dimen-
sion of Tompkins’s creativity: the words
and numbers that she awkwardly whip-
stitched to her quilts, adding a layer of per-
sonal meaning in a spidery script that
sometimes resembled graffiti done with a
Rapidograph. She signed nearly everything
with her real name, Effie, or some combina-
tion of Effie Mae Martin Howard, and often
added her nearly palindromic date of birth,
9.6.36, or the birth dates of her sons, her par-
ents and other relatives she wanted to
honor.
Sometimes the embroidery reflected her
daily Bible reading, including the Gospels,
as did her addition of appliqué crosses. Oc-
casionally she stitched the addresses of the
places she had lived, and Eli’s home. The in-
formation suggested talismanic properties,
perhaps prayers. She also said they were
meant to improve the relationships be-
tween the people evoked by the numbers. In
her “Three Sixes” quilts — inspired by the
sixes in the birth dates of three family mem-
bers — she acknowledged them by limiting
her palette to three colors: orange, yellow
and purple.
Eli died on March 6, 2018, at 82, in an
assisted-living home. To raise money for his
care, Ms. Hurth oversaw multiple yard
sales for the contents of his house — except
the quilts. The question of their destiny
hung uneasily in the air.Eli’s Surprise
Then, several months later, came the amaz-
ing news: Eli had bequeathed his entire
quilt collection to the Berkeley Art Mu-
seum, a tribute to the early advocacy of Mr.
Rinder. The final count of the Eli Leon Be-
quest was 3,100 quilts by over 400 artists.
Tompkins — represented by more than
680 quilts, quilt tops, appliqués, clothingELI LEON ARCHIVE, ELI LEON BEQUEST; BEN BLACKWELLUC BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILMUC BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM
ARCHIVE, ELI LEON BEQUEST; SHARON RISEDORPHAbove left, Rosie Lee
Tompkins (born Effie
Mae Martin) in 1985, with
one of her best-known,
most jubilant velvet
quilts, whose patches
of scaled-down piecing,
often framed, form
multiple mini-quilts. It
resembles a wall hung
with paintings. Above
right, in this medley of
blue denims, Tompkins
pays homage to her
grandfather, a farmer,
and her sons, with scraps
of worn overalls and the
pockets and labels of
jeans of more recent
vintage. Left, in a
masterpiece of velvet,
velveteen, faux fur and
panne velvet, Tompkins
conjures a night sky as
the center of an
altarpiece devoted to
heaven itself.Some of her works relate
to Pop Art; others have
the power of abstraction.CONTINUED ON PAGE 12