Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California traces the flow and flourishing of quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration. Between 1940 and 1970, millions of African Americans sought greater freedom, economic opportunities, and escape from Jim Crow segregation and racial terror in the Southern United States. Among them were hundreds of thousands of migrants who arrived in the Golden State to meet the demands of World War II defense manufacturing, paving the way for relatives and friends to follow. Some carried quilts for practical warmth, and many brought quiltmaking skills that they practiced in their new surroundings, extending the art form’s Black Southern roots westward. For families stretched across geographies and generations, quilts held significance beyond function. They were containers for ancestral memory, tethers to mothers and grandmothers, and emblems of cultural survival. In the words of bell hooks, quilts were “maps charting the course of our lives. They were history as life lived.”
Featuring over one hundred quilts by nearly ninety individuals—primarily women with ties to the San Francisco Bay Area—Routed West threads the needle between Black people’s historical movements and their quilts to tell stories of collective care, resilience, and creative ingenuity. It is the first group exhibition drawn from the African American quilt collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, a gift comprising over 3,000 quilts that were donated in 2019 by the Oakland collector Eli Leon. In honoring quiltmakers of this distinctive migrant generation and the contemporary African American quilt artists who carry this cultural and artistic tradition forward, this exhibition offers a history of art as understood through the joyful power of quilts in Black life: their layered capacity to connect everyday spaces and happenings to worlds of beauty, healing, remembrance, belonging, repair, renewal, legacy-building, and possibility.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
9,500 square feet but customizable per venue
6 months
Art Bridges is dedicated to partnering with and supporting institutions that focus on developing engaging, accessible, and dynamic exhibitions. Art Bridges provides 20% to 70% of total eligible costs while it's at your museum and significant funding for Learning & Engagement programming for outreach and engagement to bring new audiences.