Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California

June 7, 2025—November 30, 2025

Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California traces the flow and flourishing of quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration. These quilts explore the medium’s unique capacity for connecting kin across time and space, holding memory and ancestral knowledge, and opening up space for beauty and ingenuity.

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Cora Lee Hall Brown: Untitled (String Medallion with newspaper backing), c. 1970; 83 x 73 in; Bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Photo: Kevin Candland
Susan Pless: Untitled (Strip), before 1944; 82 x 75 in; Bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Photo: Kevin Candland
Alice Neal: Mary Bright Commemorative Quilt, 1956; 78 1⁄2 x 62 3⁄4 in.; Bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Photo: Kevin Candland
Emma Hall: Untitled (Double Wedding Ring), c. 1940; 71 x 71 1⁄2 in.; Bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Photo: Kevin Candland
Elizabeth Munn: Untitled (Roman Stripe Medallion); 80 1⁄2 x 70 in.; Bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Photo: Kevin Candland
Kitty Gladys Jones: pieced before 1970; Atleaver Jones: quilted c. 1978. Untitled (Square in a Square), 84 x 69 in.; Bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Photo: Kevin Candland

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Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California

June 7, 2025—November 30, 2025

Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California traces the flow and flourishing of quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration. As millions of African Americans sought greater opportunities and escape from the South’s oppressive racial environment from 1940 to 1970, they carried quilts as functional objects and physical reminders of the homes they left behind. Simultaneously, the quiltmaking skills that many migrants brought with them—ones frequently learned from mothers, grandmothers, and other kin—spurred the creation of a new wave of African American quiltmaking in the later part of the twentieth century, effectively extending its roots in the western United States. Taken together, the quilts in Routed West explore the medium’s unique capacity for connecting kin across time and space, holding memory and ancestral knowledge, and opening up space for beauty and ingenuity.

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Consisting of approximately 115 artworks by eighty individuals—many of whom hailed from Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi and Oklahoma and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area—Routed West draws exclusively from the African American quilt collection at BAMPFA. Enhanced by a fully-illustrated exhibition catalog with significant new scholarship, this exhibition invites audiences into the conversation around their joyful power as objects of African American cultural heritage and artworks within expansive art histories of the United States.

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Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California is curated by Elaine Y. Yau, Associate Curator and Academic Liaison, with Matthew Villar Miranda, Curatorial Associate.

The Henry Luce Foundation has provided generous lead support for the exhibition and accompanying catalog, including significant funding for research, conservation, and care of the African American Quilt Collection at BAMPFA. Major exhibition support is provided by the Shah Garg Women Artists Research Fund and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Additional support for the Routed West catalog is provided by Brenda and Michael Drake and a grant from the Black Studies Collaboratory at UC Berkeley, an awardee of the Mellon Foundation's Just Futures Initiative. Conservation of the quilt collection was made possible by major grants from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project, the Save America’s Treasures program of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Office of the Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley.