Untitled (Bars and Triangles)

In the United States, quilters have historically tended to be women, creating quilts for domestic use or for small-scale commercial exchange. Quilters often used everyday fabrics, including fabric scraps, to create functional pieces of art. Because of the domestic setting of production, quiltmakers’ names may be remembered through oral history – or they may not be recalled at all. This is perhaps especially true of African American women, many of whom, even after Emancipation, were systematically denied access to literacy and to having their works valued as art by the dominant white society. The Smithsonian American Art Museum currently houses this quilt, made of cotton and decorated with a unique asymmetric pattern. While the Smithsonian does not have records of the quilt’s maker, curator Leslie Umberger says that this quilt and others in the collection came from communities that had strong African American quiltmaking traditions.