At flea markets he would approach anyone selling anything to ask if they knew of quilts for sale. The question of their destiny hung uneasily in the air. 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. Their unbridled colors, irregular shapes and nearly reckless range of textiles telegraphed a tremendous energy and the implacable ambition, and confidence, of great art. Rosie Lee Tompkins grew up the eldest of 15 half-siblings, picking cotton and piecing quilts for her mother. UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Eli Leon Bequest; Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times. While works like this one relate to Pop Art, others had the power of abstraction. She was reclusive and fiercely protective of her privacy and the right to privacy of family. 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). 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 This past June, Roberta Smith wrote an intensive article on Tompkins and the show. A rugged appliquéd quilt begun in 1968, completed in 1996, celebrates California, Tompkins’s adopted state, with tourist trinkets, starlet-worthy rhinestone trim, beaded embroideries and in the lower right corner, what seems to be the back of a jacket embroidered with an image of Native Americans. They were the jewels in the crown of a collection of African-American quilts that would eventually number in the thousands. Images courtesy of BAMPFA, Berkeley. (They had met as students at Reed College and married, even though they both knew he was gay. “As an artist, Tompkins may have taken improvisation further than other quilters. 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. Rosie Lee Tompkins with one of her quilts (image courtesy BAMPFA) Even the pseudonym “Tompkins” was adopted to afford Howard privacy. Laverne Brackens, a well-known fourth-generation quilter in Texas, runs a close second, with around 300 quilts in the collection. They come at us with the force and sophistication of so-called high art, but are more democratic, without any intimidation factor. Born in Arkansas as Effie Mae Martin Howard (1936–2006), she was an African American woman who moved to Richmond, California when she was 22 and took a pseudonym to separate her art world quilts from her everyday life. Eli’s first came early, after his wife of five years left him. Anthony Meier Fine Arts will present a solo exhibition of never-before-seen works by renowned American artist Rosie Lee Tompkins(1936–2006), considered one of … Rosie Lee Tompkins is an artist who practiced meditation as quilting, who speaks directly to the current chaotic world of stay-at-home orders and social distance, our yearning for meaning. Here are feelings of awe, elation, and sublimity; here is an absolute mastery of color, texture and composition; here is inventiveness and originality so palpable and intense that each work seems like a new and total risk, a risk so extreme that only utter faith in the power of the creative spirit could have engendered it. 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. Cotton, cotton flannel and silk crepe with beads and sequins are among the fabrics that turn this small quilt from 2002 into an almost Cubist landscape of standing and floating crosses accompanied by the embroidered names of the Four Evangelists. He put three of her quilts in the show, one of which the Whitney acquired. She worked in several styles and all kinds of fabrics, using velvets — printed, panne, crushed — to gorgeous effect, in ways that rivaled oil paint. More and more I saw her as a great American artist, no qualifier needed. At the time of the show, she was 61 and living in nearby Richmond, Calif., just north of Berkeley. This September many more people will have similar moments of their own, and feel the love implicit in her extraordinary achievement, when “Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective” — the artist’s largest show yet — opens its doors once more at the Berkeley Art Museum for a run through Dec. 20. In 2016, her quilts were featured in an exhibition of five quilt artists at the Oakland Museum of California.[5]. She was born Effie Mae Martin in rural Gould, Ark., on Sept. 9, 1936. Like Rosie Lee, they were artists of color. But the “self-taught” or “outsider” labels were inaccurate for quilters. Sometimes the embroidery reflected her daily Bible reading, including the Gospels, as did her addition of appliqué crosses. 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. Another narrative quilt is more like a wall-hanging, or maybe a street mural, pieced with large fragments of black and white fabric and T-shirts printed with images of African-American athletes and political leaders. [2][3], Tompkins, who had helped her mother make quilts as a child, began to quilt seriously about 1980, while making a living as a practical nurse. A remarkable early quilt from the 1970s is pieced almost entirely of blocks of found fabric embroidered with flowers — old and new, machine- and handmade. Though I never met Tompkins, her quilts became stuck in my mind, sometimes at the forefront, sometimes in a corner. This guide invites you to look closely at the art of Rosie Lee Tompkins, with prompts for observation and opportunities to describe what you see. To submit a letter to the editor for publication, write to. 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