Why Perspective Matters: "African American Quiltworks" at the MUSE Community in Brooklyn, 1983

In 1983, twenty years prior to the Gee’s Bend quilt exhibition at the Whitney Museum, the MUSE Community Museum, an independent African American community museum located in the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, mounted an exhibition entitled “African American Quiltworks: A Continuing Tradition.” The works in the exhibition represented the work of elder traditional quilters from rural south, several Brooklyn-based quilting groups situated in senior citizen centers, and new generations of artists, such as Dindga McCannon and Michael Cummings, working in the quilt medium. Faith Ringgold, already a well-established painter, had not yet exhibited her first story quilts but contributed a soft sculpture of a grandmother and her two grandchildren sitting with a quilt spread over her lap. The show also included an appliqued banner from Benin, a Herero patchwork dress and dolls made by Herero women of Botswana dressed in similar patchwork garments. As suggested in the show’s title, the emphasis of the MUSE show was to demonstrate the continuity of the African American quilting tradition and its aesthetic links to African textiles. How this exhibition differed from other displays and publications on African American quilts during the period and the Gees Bend exhibition several decades later was a matter of perspective, participation, and community agency. “African American Quiltworks” was curated with an African American audience in mind. Both the exhibition and the accompanying public programs aimed not only to inform but to inspire and transmit the tradition to others within the local community.