African American quilt collection finds home in Berkeley

Almost 3,000 quilts by African-American artists — including more than 500 by Rosie Lee Tomkins, a quilt maker whose formally inventive work has helped elevate the standing of the discipline in the art world — are heading to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive as a bequest by Eli Leon, reports the New York Times. Leon, who died last year, was a voracious collector and champion of African-American quilting. “It’s hard to overestimate the importance and power of this gift,” Lawrence Rinder, the museum’s director and chief curator, said in an interview. “The scale of it and the depth of it is mind blowing.” The bequest, which includes the pieces by Tompkins and works by more than 400 artists from across the country, will account for about 15 percent of the art collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, which is affiliated with the University of California. Leon’s collection will help introduce the public to African-American quilt makers other than the women of Gee’s Bend, Ala., whose work was showcased in a celebrated exhibition that Rinder helped bring to the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002. In his review for the Times, Michael Kimmelman called the show’s 60 quilts “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.” Said Rinder, “Gee’s Bend, which a lot of people know about now, happily, that’s one small town in one state in the South. Eli’s collection is a broad overview of hundreds of other towns and the work that was made in them.” Two exhibitions of quilts from the bequest have already been planned. The first, a retrospective of Thomkins’ work, will open on Feb. 19, 2020. The second will follow in early 2022 and focus on the others artists represented in the collection, such as Willia Ette Graham and Arbie Williams. The breadth of Leon’s collection and its emphasis on Tompkins’ quilts are closely linked. It was a chance encounter with Tompkins at a flea market in the Oakland, Calif., area in 1985 that convinced Leon, a psychotherapist, to dedicate his life to collecting quilts by African-American artists.