#7A-B PERSONAL NARRATIVE AND SYMBOLS PAPER QUILTS

SIGNS & SYMBOLS: African Images in African American Quilts 

by Maude Southwell Wahlman

This week we are looking at a study of symbols that impact African American traditions.Taking from these ideas shapes and symbols to create our own personal collage quilts, to use as the front and back cover of our Collage Memory Journals. As you read and look through the samples below think about using copies of family photos and shapes here to create a personal visual narrative the says something about you and the roots you come from.

Sample of paper quilt narrative of the instructors family tree, which serves as the front cover of her journal
Note how the West African Adinkra symbol (black on pink paper) is incorporated into the design.

The  above publication, Signs and Symbols..., is the result of years of research study and travel to rural communities in the South, by author Maude Southwell Wahlman, who begin to analysis the relationship between African symbols and its American counter part in African American quilts... 

In this book Wahlman, talks about an exhibit she curated along with John Scully at the Yale School of Art Gallery. At that time they noticed seven traits that seemed to distinguish African American quilts from the Anglo-American traditions. Even though these African American quilts communities worked in isolation of from other each other. They found a distinct emphasis on the following design elements:

1.   vertical strips

2.   bright colors

3.   large designs

4.   asymmetry

5.   improvisation

6.   multiple patterning

7.   symbolic forms

This aesthetic criteria was just a starting point for beginning to understand how African textiles influenced early generations of African American quilters, and continue to influence mostly Southern communities as well. Wahlman determined that "many guilt-top designs were similar to designs found in African religious textiles, designs that can be decoded because contemporary Africans know what the symbolic designs mean."

"...The antecedents of contemporary African textiles and African American quilts were developed in Africa as far back as two thousand years ago, when cotton was domesticated along the Niger River in Mali, and used for fishnets and woven cloth. The actual links between African and African American textile traditions [however], can be traced to the years between 1650 and 1850." Which coincides with the height of slave trade in the Americas.

"Although men had traditionally been the primary textile artists in Africa, American plantation owners adhered to the European system of labor division. Thus African women became the principal weavers, seamstresses, and quilters in southern society. African women produced utilitarian and decorative  quilts for both black and white households. Many of their quilts were done in the traditional Anglo-American styles. However, those quilts made for personal, offer utilitarian, uses by African Americans were designed and stitched with African traditions in mind."

For the purposes of the paper quilt journal covers we will construct in class, we will be borrowing from the following criteria:

Strip quilt by Catherine Somerville Alabama 1940

• STRIPS: which are chief construction techniques and a dominant design symbol in West Africa, the Caribbean and African American textiles. This is a form of patchwork, that occur in African textile history among the Fante Asafo flags, Asante cloth from Ghana, Egungun costumes of the Yoruba people of Nigeria and the Kuiba people of the Cameroon, and the Pygmies of Central Africa. In the printed textiles of the Dioula people of Senegal, and Sierra Leone. A tradition of strips also continued in the new world in Southern part of North America, Brazil and Suriname, in South America, and in Haiti via a striped cloth called Mayo, worn to protect one against evil spirits.

• The Above quilt was made by Catherine Somerville, one of the Gee's Bend, Alabama Quilt makers. A simple poor US community, bond by love and family, the women there have been using the stripping method of quilting for generations. Discovered by the outside world in the 1970's, Gee's Bend quilts are now highly prized as art work and sell for thousands of dollars.

Bible Textile by Harriet Powers, Athens, Georgia, c 1896

• APPLIQUÉD: Besides piecing, in which strip patterns dominated, another basic quilt technique known in Europe, Africa, and America is the appliqué, the art of sewing cut-out shapes onto a surface. African cultures used this technique to record histories, religious values, and the personal histories of famous individuals.  Popular designs would symbolize power, skill, leadership, wisdom, courage, balance, composure, and other personal or religious qualities. The best known African appliquéd cloth was made by the Fon people of the Republic of Benin (formerly Dahomey). The most noted example of African American appliquéd was created Harriet Powers. 

ALBUM QUILT, Josie Covington, Triume,TN 1895

• RELIGIOUS SYMBOLS: An analysis of African American  folk art suggests a cultural strategy of sorting African heritages into luxuries as essential intellectual tools to comprehend the new world... Writing and healing charms are two significant religious concepts that had profound influence on traditional African American folk art. Adinkra symbols fall into this category. Adinkra symbols are used by the Asante people of Ghana to make Adinkra cloth; Nsibidi script is used by the Igbo people of Nigeria to create Ukara cloth. Other symbols include Vai Syllabary, cosmograms, and ground paintings. The African American quilt descendant of these symbols is the "Album Quilt." Exemplifying the African American principle of protective multiple patterning, because evil spirits would have to decode the complex mixture of  patterns before they could do any harm. 

MEN QUILT, by Sarah Mary Taylor, 

Yazoo City MS, 1979

•  PROTECTIVE CHARMS: Various African traditions of healing or protective charms have experienced a renaissance in African American visual arts, including quilts. In the new world, they took different forms and meanings, partly because ideas from West and Central Africa fused and then creolized with Native American and European ideas in new cultural environments. Charms are an important aspect of African American religious societies. Charms are made in Africa and the New World by priest or priestess, conjure man or women, spirit-diviner or folk artist. Protective charms were (are) used on ceremonial hats and clothing, various kinds of dolls such as voodoo and calabash, and quilts. Symbols include hands, animals, colors, and words. Like the album quilt African and African American folk art culture uses words to confuse spirits. 

Faith Ringgold, The Dinner Quilt, 1986

•  CONTEMPORARY TRENDS: Finally, African American quilting is a unique American art form with its own history and style.... All art exist within a cultural complex as one aspect of the material objects produced by living peoples in concert with other aspects of their lives. The images used in African American quilts are drawn from a bevy of emotions, events, activities, life passages. Contemporary quilters and mixed media artists such as Faith Ringgold, NedRa Bonds, Jesse Lane, Wini McQueen, Joyce Scott, and Yvonne Wells, and others have drawn on traditional folk designs for inspiration in creating their fine arts.

Appliqué cloth Republic of Benin; Fon peoples Late 20th century 

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Ndebele Woman sitting in front of her wall painting

• Adinkra West African Symbols
• African American Quilt Traditions
• Conversation Pieces
• Gees Bend Quilt Catalog
• Ndzundza Ndebele people of South Africa symbol house painting 
• Quilting Guilds in New Jersey
• Reading Ndebele Wallpaintings...
• Symbols Dictionary
• Underground Railroad Quilt Code
• Undergournd Railroad - Pathway to Freedom (Maryland)
• Underground Railroad - Quilt Code Dispute (Wikipedia)
• Writing Systems of Africa
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