Continuing through November 30, 2025
Jacob Lawrence painted his epic “Migration Series” on the eve of World War II. Its sixty panels chronicle the aspirations, disillusionments, and accomplishments of the millions of African Americans who quit the rural South for the industrialized Midwest and East between 1910 and 1940. They sought jobs, education, and escape from Jim Crow.
“Routed West: Twentieth Century African American Quilts in California” picks up that narrative by shifting the spotlight to the West Coast, where a second wave of migrants found work, mostly in the defense industry, during the war. It invites us to consider quilts as portals to ongoing stories. Stories about individuals, families, and communities. Stories told in multiple voices.
Some of the earliest of these accounts speak of their tellers’ self-reliance in the face of economic hardship and a racial caste system. Take Louisiana-born Annie Crawford’s checkerboard puff quilt (1933–40), sewn from the cotton Bull Durham bags used for picking tobacco. Crawford asked her relatives to save their worn bags and bring them to family reunions. After seven years, she had collected enough to dye half of the fabric blue, cut and hand piece 520 rectangles, stuff them with cotton batting, and then quilt them. As curator Elaine Y. Yau writes in the show’s informative catalog, Crawford thus transformed trappings of the two commodities that made the white Southern elite wealthy on the backs of African Americans. The result was a bedcover that brought comfort and warmth to her family.
Other quiltmakers rely on pictures and words. Alice Neal, for one, created the poignant “Mary Bright Commemorative Quilt” (1955–56) after her mother died. Centered on Neal’s copy of a photo portrait of her mother, it uses fabric, lace, and buttons left over from the dress that Bright sewed and wears in the picture. Turning to a more abstract visual language, Neal surrounds the portrait with quilt blocks that evoke aspects of her mother’s life, along with stars representing a favorite hymn.
The exhibition demonstrates in Neal’s and others’ work that quilts are vessels for intergenerational love. Angelia Tobias, having learned sewing skills from her mother, represented her in a quilt (1983) that she created with Tobias’ grandmother. A medley of calicos, it is striking for its unusual necktie-patterned quilt blocks punctuated with yellow ties. In Tobias’ “Medallion” (pieced by Tobias in 1984, quilted by Irene Bankhead in 1987) triangles nest in a field of rectangles and bars. The work has commanding rhythm and shape and turns up the volume with vivid color.
“Routed West” is an aesthetic knockout. The quilts pulse with off-kilter geometries, syncopated colors, and jazzy pattern combinations. Like Tobias’ “Medallion,” most lean on time-honored patterns. But patterns do not equal stasis. Lee Wanda Jones’s “Road to Nowhere” (1988, quilted by Willia Ette Graham and Johnnie Wade) is also a “Medallion” of sorts, but Jones mostly improvises. Its purples and cherry red make the quilt zing. Optical dazzle also elevates Johnnie Wade’s 1990 “Log Cabin” (quilted by Willia Ette Graham), with its inverted light and dark Z’s. As for Bettie Phillips’s “The Fence” (1985), the quiltmaker knew when to interrupt the grid the grounds the work, shifting from one blue fabric to others and swapping red bars for pink. Fans of Sol LeWitt and Sean Scully, take note.
The show ends with contemporary work, emphasizing the point that quilt making remains tightly stitched into the fabric of Black communities. In this section, as well as throughout the exhibition, texts, photographs, and ephemera supplement the quilts. Through such ephemera another story unfolds: that of the quilts’ survival. Against long odds, many have endured hard use, multiple moves, their creators’ passings. They have withstood pests and mold. Their inheritors have not sold them to strangers because they are tangible links to loved ones rather than mere household items. Eventually they were acquired — some retrieved from dumpsters — by Oakland psychologist Eli Leon, whose estate donated his collection of more than 3,000 quilts to the museum.
In 2023, the museum received a grant of $461,512 from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to support the imperative and time-sensitive conservation of these quilts. This April, however, with work well underway but more than $260,000 still unspent, the IMLS, now under the direction of the Trump administration, notified the museum of the grant’s termination. “Routed West” represents a soul-satisfying respite from such dismal news. See the exhibition, remember it, and get angry that such handcrafted treasures are threatened.
