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Joyful, Improvisational, and Pertaining to God
The Quilt Art of Rosie Lee Tompkins
By Heather K. Michon
From the time she appeared on the art scene in the 1980s there were people who doubted that master quilt artist Rosie Lee Tompkins actually existed. Her work was unsigned. She never appeared at her own openings or shows - at least as far as anyone knew. She gave no interviews. Only four people in the art world ever actually met her face-to-face. There was not a single published photo of her.
With the announcement of her death on December 1, 2006 at the age of 70 it quickly became clear that not only did Tompkins exist, but she had led something akin to a double life. She was at once Effie Mae Howard, a devoted family woman, a hard worker, a deeply spiritual soul; and Rosie Lee Tompkins, a skilled fiber artist whose virtuoso sense of design inspired breathless prose from the critics and whose work hung in some of the most prestigious galleries and museums in the country.
She acquired her craft early in life. Effie Mae Howard, née Martin, was born in rural Arkansas in 1936, one of 15 children in a family of sharecroppers. Money was usually tight. As a practical skill, patchwork quilting is an art of frugality - of using every salvageable scrap of fabric, no matter how irregularly shaped, in order to turn it into something useful - and Effie Mae learned that lesson well. "We had a big bench and everybody sat around and pieced quilts," recalls her sister, Maxcine McCollough. "I never liked it, but my sister loved it."
Effie Mae left Arkansas in the 1950s for Detroit and eventually Richmond, California, a working-class suburb of San Francisco, where she spent the remainder of her life. She married and divorced twice, raised children and stepchildren, worked for many years as a nurse, took adult education classes, and lived a quiet private life. Her quilts were usually gifts for family and friends.
She was "discovered" in her early fifties, after a chance encounter with quilt scholar Eli Leon at a flea market in Marin County in 1988. As a specialist in African-American quilt design, he was stunned by the artistry of her work. His first view of her work left him "completely and utterly flabbergasted," he said in her obituary in The Los Angeles Times.
It took some convincing, but Leon soon began to introduce her work to the outside world, beginning with a group exhibition of a number of African-American quilters he was curating called "Who'd a Thought It?" At the last minute Effie Mae balked at using her name in public, so he suggested the pseudonym "Rosie Lee Tompkins" and made a mad eleventh-hour rush to reprint exhibition literature. The 1988 show began in San Francisco and eventually toured 28 other venues, including the Smithsonian and the American Craft Museum in New York.
Her work delighted the critics. Tompkins' designs fall into a category of African-American "improvisational" quilts, which tend to use bold colors and irregular patterns. Some scholars, including Leon, see the elements of traditional African design, while others see it more as a form of abstract or modernist art.
In any case, Tompkins' complex designs were fascinating to behold. "Unerring and intuitive in their sense of color, shape and scale, Ms. Tompkins' quilts are formidably joyful visual events that ignore the usual boundaries between cultures, histories and mediums," wrote one reviewer for The New York Times.
Unlike most quilters, who work primarily in cotton, Tompkins collected most of her materials from thrift stores and worked with whatever she had at hand, including rayon, polyester, old flags, cut-up T-shirts, even fake fur. This often gave her designs a texture and play missing from pure cotton.
She did her piecework both by machine and hand-stitching, but during the years Tompkins' work was shown in public, the actual quilting (where the piecework top was attached to the batting and backing layers) was done by others. Leon hired skilled African-American quilt makers for that task, because they "could handle improvisational tops," he wrote in an interview by email. Because nothing was really measured, this could end up requiring a lot of improvisation on the part of the quilt maker, who had to somehow devise a stitching pattern that didn't destroy the integrity of Tompkins' design.
Tompkins' work is part of the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Oakland Museum in California. She had solo exhibits at the Berkeley Art Museum and the Mills College Museum of Art in California. The exhibit at the Shelburne Museum this season will be her first solo show outside the West Coast.
She came to enjoy her peculiar brand of fame, according to Leon. In her Los Angeles Times obituary, he wrote that "Rosie Lee Tompkins was reclusive, but Effie Mae Howard was not." She covered her walls with posters of her work and read all the critical reviews. If her work was showing locally, she would sometimes drop by the see the show--anonymously, of course. "She loved having her quilts published and exhibited as long as she didn't have to go and her name wasn't used," he told Vermont Woman in an email.
What the critics saw was one thing; how she approached her art was another. To Tompkins, quilt-making was an embodiment of her spiritual self. She saw herself as an instrument of God, and her quilts were a reflection of God's guidance. Each of her designs was the end result of prayer and meditation, and reflected a very personal symbology. Always, she "put Christ at the center of it," she told Leon. The title of the Shelburne Museum exhibit, "Something Pertaining to God," reflects that deep sense of religiosity that dominated her work.
Tompkins suffered a nervous breakdown in the late 1970s, and thereafter was plagued by voices in her head and the sense that she was being watched. This could be one of the reasons she guarded her privacy so zealously. In her New York Times obituary, Leon wrote, "Something she told me once was that despite the fact that nobody knew who she was, she felt like she had no privacy. She felt like she lived in a glass house, and people were watching her."
Medication only relieved some of the symptoms and carried unpleasant side-effects. According to Leon, it was quilting that gave her the most peace. She was prolific, producing by his estimates about 400 pieces of various sizes in the 19 years he knew her.
Tompkins' unexpected death in December caused major changes in the planned exhibit. All the pieces originally included in the show were from Eli Leon's private collection, but his standing promise to protect her anonymity constrained the pieces he could donate. With her passing, Leon was able to add some of her signed quilts and small pieces, which had earlier been off-limits. And, for the first time, her photograph will be shown.
Something Pertaining to God: The Patchwork Art of Rosie Lee Tompkins, will be showing at the Shelburne Museum's Hat and Fragrance Textile Gallery through October 28, 2007. The Museum is open daily from 10am-5pm. For admission details, see www.shelburnemuseum.org.
Heather Michon is a Vermont woman currently living in Central Virginia.
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Vermont Woman is a forum for news, issues, features, arts and entertainment from the perspective, experience, and voices of Vermont women. Vermont Woman is a monthly newspaper published in South Burlington, Vermont and is excerpted here on this site. All content ©Copyright 2006, Vermont Woman Publishing |
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