Accidentally on Purpose: The Management of Irregularities in African Textiles and African-American Quilts - Softcover

Leon, Eli

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0977149129 ISBN 13: 9780977149124

Publisher: Figge Art Museum, 2007

Synopsis

This catalogue has been published in conjunction with the exhibition: Accidentally on Purpose: Improvisation in African Textiles and African-American Quilts, presented at the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa from November 18, 2006 to February 11, 2007.
Accidentally on Purpose presents 129 African textiles and improvisational African-American quilts by 61 quilters. These quilts differ from standard-traditional quilts in their use of approximate measurement, flexible patterns, bold colors, strong contrast, multiple patterns, shifts in scale, scrap applique, and construction techniques similar to those used in West and Central African textiles. The exhibition and catalogue explore the relationship between these transatlantic traditions. Accidentally on Purpose celebrates the sophistication, vivacity, and significance of improvisational African-American quilts, both as artistic achievements and as expressions of African-American culture.

About this title

Synopsis

This exuberantly illustrated book celebrates the sophistication, vivacity, and significance of improvisational African-American quilts, both as artistic achievements and as expressions of African-American traditions. The knowledge, attitudes, and values carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans appear to have informed a quilt-making tradition so powerful that, to this day, it preserves its identity in a special province of African-American quilts.Such 'Afro-traditional' quilts are made by people who have no formal art training and who usually do not consider themselves artists; they learned their craft and absorbed its aesthetics by watching and helping their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers who, in turn, learned form previous generations. The resulting - often highly idiosyncratic - quilts call out to be seen as the works of art that they are. The brilliance of this work must be partially credited to a tradition which encourages individual expression and provides a context in which the talents of individual artists can flourish.

Improvisation, pervasive in black African art and familiar as a basic element of many African-American musical forms, is a vital force in this tradition.The artists maintain a generous attitude toward the accidental, embracing innovations that originate beyond the conscious domain. They use approximate measurement and 'flexible patterning', in which the design, conceived of as an invitation to variation, will not repeat, but will materialize in a sequence of visual elaborations. Afro-traditional attitudes and methods are antithetical to the standard American quilt-making tradition in which great value is placed on precise measurement and exact pattern replication. Instead they bear a keen likeness to the improvisatory practices of the textile-makers of Kongo and West Africa, regions from which American slaves were taken. These antipathies and affinities suggest an enduring African influence on the Afro-traditional quilt.

Edition details

• Publisher: Figge Art Museum
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0977149129
• ISBN 13: 9780977149124
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176