rosie lee tompkins

But even they couldn’t prepare me for the visual force of the 62 quilts and five assemblage-like memory jugs, dating from the 1970s to 2004. To submit a letter to the editor for publication, write to. One of Tompkins’s most spectacular velvets is edged with these framed mini-quilts, which surround an enormous field of blue velvets that creates a kind of van Gogh night sky; they can read as small painted side panels on an altarpiece. Above and to the right a circle of twisted bands and leaves suggests both a crown of thorns and a laurel wreath. The area was also paradise for quilt collectors, one of whom was Eli, born in the Bronx in 1935 and trained as a psychologist, whose collecting instincts verged on hoarding. Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006) is the art pseudonym of Effie Mae Martin Howard, a widely-acclaimed African-American quiltmaker and fiber artist of Richmond, California. The planets had aligned: I’d happened on the first solo show anywhere of Rosie Lee Tompkins, an exemplar of one of the country’s premier visual traditions: African-American improvisational quilt-making — an especially innovative branch of a medium that reaches back to African textiles and continues to thrive. Laverne Brackens, a well-known fourth-generation quilter in Texas, runs a close second, with around 300 quilts in the collection. To raise money for his care, Ms. Hurth oversaw multiple yard sales for the contents of his house — except the quilts. As with Ohr, Tompkins’s work triggered a kind of joy on first encounter. (It was written about in the Home Section of The New York Times, but significantly not in the Art pages.). The quilter felt she was an instrument of God and saw her work as an expression of her faith and his designs. She said she believed God directed her hand and her art. Effie Mae Martin had grown up as her mother’s apprentice in a kind of atelier: a small town full of female friends and relatives who quilted, the older ones showing and telling the younger ones how it was done. The scraps of silk crepe, worthy of a flapper’s party dress, provide rhinestone angels above and the Mount of Olives below. In 1997 I walked into the Berkeley Art Museum to be greeted by a staggering sight: an array of some 20 quilts unlike any I had ever seen. It has the looseness of a drawing, but the selvage edges give the crosses a hint of solidity and raking light. His dementia was much further along but he smiled as Ms. Hurth introduced me to another dimension of Tompkins’s creativity: the words and numbers that she awkwardly whipstitched to her quilts, adding a layer of personal meaning in a spidery script that sometimes resembled graffiti done with a Rapidograph. She reminded me of George Ohr, the unparalleled turn-of-the-century potter from Biloxi, Miss., whose work was rediscovered in the early 1970s. They come at us with the force and sophistication of so-called high art, but are more democratic, without any intimidation factor. She also said they were meant to improve the relationships between the people evoked by the numbers. That 1997 Berkeley show was my first Rosie Lee Tompkins moment. But within a year he began building a résumé of articles, exhibitions and lectures about the importance of African-American quilts as well as their frequent emphasis on improvisation and their links to African textiles. “Rosie Lee Tompkins was an astonishingly original and visionary artist whose work delivers a powerful visual, emotional, and even spiritual experience,” said Rinder. One of her narrative works was 14 feet across, the size of small billboard. In 2016, her quilts were featured in an exhibition of five quilt artists at the Oakland Museum of California.[5]. I left in a state of shock — I knew I had been instantly converted but I didn’t yet know to what. Eli’s first came early, after his wife of five years left him. More than 500 works by Tompkins reside at the Berkeley Art Museum. [8], Works pieced by Tompkins include Tents of Armageddon Four Patch (1986),[9] Three Sixes (1987), Half-Squares Put-Together (1988), Half-Squares Medallion (1986), Half-squares Four-patch (1986), and Put Together with Letter "F" (1985). Sometimes the embroidery reflected her daily Bible reading, including the Gospels, as did her addition of appliqué crosses. Her special areas of interest include ceramics textiles, folk and outsider art, design and video art. (They had met as students at Reed College and married, even though they both knew he was gay. He would later write, “She was evasive, but eventually let on that she herself dabbled in the craft.”. She was the only female artist I knew who seemed of their stature — perhaps beyond it — which was doubly exhilarating. As a result her quilts could be deliriously akimbo, imbued with a mesmerizing pull of differences and inconsistencies that communicates impassioned attention and care. In a velvet quilt from 1992, the viewer is startled into closer attention by an eruption of black and white (upper right) in a field of rich colors and patch of small green and black squares framed in burnt orange, a quilt-within-a-quilt (lower left). With this visit, I joined a scattered group of individuals who had been seduced by Eli’s dedication but mainly by his collection, and were now concerned for its fate. The information suggested talismanic properties, perhaps prayers. (Others, like Henry Darger and James Castle, were white.) Rosie Lee Tompkins, extraordinary quilter we need to know. At the time of the show, she was 61 and living in nearby Richmond, Calif., just north of Berkeley. She worked with the convention of the quilt block but with enormous variation in size, free distortions of shape and vivid color contrasts that have been described as "geometric anarchy" and "riotous mosaics. In this masterpiece of velvet, velveteen, faux fur and panne velvet, Rosie Lee Tompkins conjures a night sky as the center of an altarpiece devoted to heaven itself. What else? While works like this one relate to Pop Art, others had the power of abstraction. The BAMPFA exhibition catalog presents the quilts and found-object art of Rosie Lee Tompkins through brilliant photos and thoughtful essays. Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective Where : Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center St., Berkeley When : 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays; closes July 19 (Eli was not shy about his considerable brilliance.) The New York Times named the catalog one of the Best Art Books of 2020. Though it began with Effie Mae Martin, it came to include a small, nervous collector named Eli Leon, who met her in 1985, fell in love with her quilts and those of many other African-American creators in and around Richmond — and devoted half his life to acquiring and studying, exhibiting and writing about their work. Rosie Lee Tompkins, 1936–2006. An incredible retrospective of Rosie Lee Tompkins with 62 quilts and five assemblage-like memory jugs was staged last year at BAMPFA. Rosie Lee Tompkins Anthony Meier Fine Arts Rosie Lee Tompkins, Untitled, ca. More and more I saw her as a great American artist, no qualifier needed. But she was also adept with denim, faux furs, distressed T-shirts and fabrics printed with the faces of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jr. and Magic Johnson. Interest and support are coming forth: The museum has already received a $500,000 grant from the Luce Foundation for a follow-up survey of Eli’s entire gift in 2022, which should be every bit as surprising as this one. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, "The Radical Quilting of Rosie Lee Tompkins", "Rosie Lee Tompkins, 70; Quilter Dazzled, Mystified the Art World", "Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006) - Encyclopedia of Arkansas", "Yo-Yos & Half Squares: Contemporary California Quilts | Oakland Museum of California", "Fractal Geometry in African American Quilt Traditions", "Rosie Lee Tompkins, African-American Quiltmaker, Dies at 70", "BAMPFA Receives Historic Bequest of Nearly Three Thousand Quilts by African American Artists", "African-American Art Quilts Find a Museum Home in California", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rosie_Lee_Tompkins&oldid=989472356, Short description is different from Wikidata, Wikipedia articles with RKDartists identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 19 November 2020, at 04:55. Spread out in the museum’s sky-lighted galleries, the work’s beauty is more insistent than ever. An image provided by Eli Leon, Rosie Lee Tompkins in 1985. Rosie Lee Tompkins was a pseudonym, I would learn, adopted by a fiercely private, deeply religious woman, who as her work received more and more attention, was almost never photographed or interviewed. This exhibition, again organized by Mr. Rinder, the museum’s director until March, with Elaine Y. Yau, a postdoctoral curatorial fellow, marks the end of a 35-year saga. She worked in several styles and all kinds of fabrics, using velvets — printed, panne, crushed — to gorgeous effect, in ways that rivaled oil paint. At flea markets he would approach anyone selling anything to ask if they knew of quilts for sale. Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective marks the first exhibition at BAMPFA of Tompkins’s work since this transformative bequest, and it includes dozens of quilts that have never been exhibited previously. In a gallery in “Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective” at the Berkeley Art Museum, a quilt made mostly of double knit polyester (far left) holds its own against a quilt with a similar “house” motif in various kinds of velvet. "[1] More than 500 works by Tompkins reside at the Berkeley Art Museum. Rosie Lee Tompkins worked only for Christ and created works of enduring beauty. 19 pages. Rosie Lee Tompkins (born Effie Mae Martin) in 1985, with one of her best known, most jubilant velvet quilts, whose patches of scaled-down piecing, often framed, form multiple mini-quilts. I saw Eli once more, in 2016, when I went to Berkeley to review the inauguration of the museum’s new building. Then, several months later, came the amazing news: Eli had bequeathed his entire quilt collection to the Berkeley Art Museum, a tribute to the early advocacy of Mr. Rinder. In memory the show became a jubilant fugue of small squares of velvet in deep gemstone hues, dancing with not much apparent order yet impeccably arranged for full effect. Rosie Lee Tompkins Unknown Binding – January 1, 1997 by Lawrence Rinder (Author) 3.0 out of 5 stars 1 rating. The curator of the Berkeley show, Lawrence Rinder, wrote: In front of Tompkins's work I feel that certain Modernist ambitions may in fact be achievable. “As an artist, Tompkins may have taken improvisation further than other quilters. As New York Times critic Roberta Smith put it, “Tompkins’s textile art [works]…demolish the category.”. She only ever met four people as the artist “Rosie Lee Tompkins” (curator Lawrence Rinder, Africanist Robert Farris Thompson, historian Glenna Matthews, and myself, since I am a quilt scholar). ‘Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective’ — By Elaine Y. Yau, Lawrence Rinder and Horace Ballard (University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive): The catalog to the first retrospective of the quilt artist Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936-2006) is essential to familiarity with the achievements of superlative 20th-century artists who never set foot in the art world. Tompkins was an inventive colorist whose generous use of black added to the gravity of her efforts. On the plane out to San Francisco in February, I read the exhibition catalog cover to cover. Eager for more information about the artist, Mr. Rinder called up Eli, who responded, “You like that piece? “I hope they spread a lot of love.”. She even had a printed business card that offered “Crazy Quilts and Pillows All Sizes.” By the late 1970s, according to the current exhibition’s catalog, she was earning as much as $400 a weekend from sales and was able to quit her nursing job. The comments section is closed. Tompkins' quilts were featured in a solo exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in 1997, at Peter Blum Gallery in New York City in 2003, and at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont in 2007. His 1987 show, “Who’d a Thought It: Improvisation in African-American Quiltmaking,” included a catalog essay by the well-known Africanist Robert Ferris Thompson alongside his own. Publication date. You could hear it in the reviews of the 2002 Whitney Biennial, which Mr. Rinder organized during his stint there as curator of contemporary art. Tompkins elicits emotion by stripping away casual relationships in favor of intensity. It opened at the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum in 1987 and, over the next decade, toured to 25 museums — including the American Craft Museum in New York City in 1989. The show begins by demonstrating Tompkins’s unusual range and versatility, juxtaposing quilts in smoldering velvets with a medley of found denims — a homage to her grandfather and other farmers in her family. [2] Despite the fact that she was a deeply private person and rarely sold her quilts, her work was discovered in 1985 by Eli Leon, an Oakland-based collector specializing in African-American quilts. In photographs, Rosie Lee looks tall, of regal posture. “I think it’s because I love them so much that God let me see all these different colors,” Tompkins once said of her patchworks. There were obituaries in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Boston Globe. Previous page. This early Rosie Lee Tompkins quilt from the ’70s is an ecumenical sampling of found embroideries of flowers — old, new, hand- and machine-made — which function as offerings to the center medallion showing the risen Christ, bearing the wounds of stigmata upon his hands. On February 19th, 2020, a massive retrospective of nearly seventy works by Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936-2006), an accomplished African-American quilt artist, opened at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) . Rosie Lee Tompkins is the pseudonym of quilter Effie Mae Howard, who carefully guarded her privacy after her rise to national prominence in the late 1990s. She signed nearly everything with her real name, Effie, or some combination of Effie Mae Martin Howard, and often added her nearly palindromic date of birth, 9.6.36, or the birth dates of her sons, her parents and other relatives she wanted to honor. I need help,” his thin reedy voice said. Rosie Lee and Eli were an odd pair, both willful, defensive and fragile. Like Rosie Lee, they were artists of color. She all but abandoned pattern for an inspired randomness with an emphasis on serial disruptions that constantly divert or startle the eye — like the badge of a California prison guard sewn to an otherwise conventional crazy quilt. Eli made three trips to the South — on a Guggenheim grant in one instance — to meet the relatives of quilters he knew and collected around Oakland. He had received a diagnosis of dementia, and was worried about what would become of his collection, which he wanted to keep intact. It would be gratifying to learn that she did not act alone. She was reclusive and fiercely protective of her privacy and the right to privacy of family. Occasionally she stitched the addresses of the places she had lived, and Eli’s home. In this medley of blue denims, Tompkins pays homage to her grandfather, a farmer, and her sons, with scraps of worn overalls and the pockets and labels of jeans of more recent vintage. Her abstract, improvisational compositions often had a personal significance: one of her more well-known works, "Three Sixes," involves three relatives whose birthdays include the number 6. This reclusive woman, who hid from the public and who had no interest in public acclaim, created the stunning quilts, that were… Effie Mae Howard (1936-2006) was a recluse from Richmond, California … I mentioned her work in my writing when I could. Such physical realism is all but impossible to achieve with paint. 1936-2006 The African American, California quilt maker, known as Rosie Lee Tompkins, always remained anonymous. Mr. Rinder’s Rosie Lee Tompkins conversion took place in a show of black and white quilts by African-Americans that Eli organized in 1996 at the Richmond Art Center. Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective marks the first exhibition at BAMPFA of Tompkins’s work since this transformative bequest, and it includes dozens of quilts that have never been exhibited previously. A triumphal retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum confirms her standing as one of the great American artists — transcending craft, challenging painting and reshaping the canon. The textile of hers that jumped out at Mr. Rinder is impressive even in photographs. Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006) is the art pseudonym of Effie Mae Martin Howard, a widely-acclaimed African-American quiltmaker and fiber artist of Richmond, California. This past June, Roberta Smith wrote an intensive article on Tompkins and the show. Initially she seemed to belong to the first rank of outsider artists who began reshaping the American art canon around 1980, such geniuses as Martín Ramírez, Bill Traylor and Joseph Yoakum. It seemed like a map of the melting pot of American culture and politics. Language: English. And Horace D. Ballard, a former divinity student who is now a curator and art historian at Williams College and its museum, writes that Tompkins “lived in service of a higher calling,” tying her efforts to sacred music, texts and architecture. As a child in rural Arkansas, she learned the southern African American quilting tradition from her mother. A deeper understanding and knowledge of these, especially where art is concerned, must be part of the necessary rectification and healing that America faces. Rosie Lee Tompkins at her home in Richmond, Calif., 1997. They both possessed an extraordinary skill and idiosyncratic abandon that creates a new sense of the possibilities of the hand, visual wit and beauty in any medium. [10], Tompkins's quilts were not made from old clothes or other scraps but from fabrics she purchased for their textures and light-reflecting qualities, including velvet, fake fur, wool, silk and Lurex. Roberta Smith, the co-chief art critic, regularly reviews museum exhibitions, art fairs and gallery shows in New York, North America and abroad. Our quilts of today are stand-alone pieces of art, but should not detract from the work of an artist such as Rosie Lee Thompkins. Or perhaps not. UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Eli Leon Bequest; Ben Blackwell. In addition, the fabrics — variously elegant, every day and ersatz — bring a lot with them, not just color and texture, but also manufacturing techniques and social connotations. Cooke is senior curator for special projects at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. The first work I ever saw by Rosie Lee Tompkins was in an exhibition titled Showing Up , at the Richmond Art Center, in a town just north of Berkeley, California. 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