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Quilting in West Africa: Liberian Women Stitching Political, Economic, and Social Networks in the Nineteenth Century

Arts (Basel), 2023-05, Vol.12 (3), p.97 [Peer Reviewed Journal]

COPYRIGHT 2023 MDPI AG ;2023 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License. ;ISSN: 2076-0752 ;EISSN: 2076-0752 ;DOI: 10.3390/arts12030097

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  • Title:
    Quilting in West Africa: Liberian Women Stitching Political, Economic, and Social Networks in the Nineteenth Century
  • Author: Beck Cohen, Stephanie
  • Subjects: 19th century ; Abolition of slavery ; African Americans ; Atlantic world ; Audiences ; Autobiographical literature ; black Atlantic ; Black people ; Coffee ; colonialism ; Economic aspects ; Evaluation ; Liberia ; Narratives ; nationalism ; Participation ; Political aspects ; Politics ; Queens ; Quilting ; Social aspects ; Social networks ; Society ; Textiles ; Women ; Women artists ; Works
  • Is Part Of: Arts (Basel), 2023-05, Vol.12 (3), p.97
  • Description: Quilts occupy a liminal position in the histories of art and material culture. Centering analyses around specific artworks like Martha Ricks’ 1892 Coffee Tree quilt, as well as investigating women’s writing about their material production, illuminates ignored narratives about the ways black women participated in international social, political, and economic networks around the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Quilters who emigrated from the United States to Liberia in the nineteenth century incorporated an aesthetic heritage from the American South with new visual vocabularies developing alongside the newly independent nation. Artists relied on networks with abolitionists in the United States and local textile knowledge to source materials for their work. Finished quilts circulated in local and international contexts, furthering social, political, and economic objectives. Like Harriet Powers’ bible quilts, Ricks’ quilts gained fame through exhibition and a whimsical artist’s biography. Quilts’ fragility as natural-fiber textiles in a tropical climate makes a finding a body of works difficult to examine as there are no extant Liberian quilts from the nineteenth century. However, it is possible to patch together a network of women artists, their patrons, and audiences from West Africa to North America and Europe through creative investigation of diverse historical records, including diary entries, letters, newspaper articles, and photographs. I argue that by examining Martha Ricks’ artworks, self-presentation through portraiture, and published writing, it is possible to envision a new narrative of black women’s participation in visualizing the newly-minted Republic of Liberia for Atlantic audiences.
  • Publisher: Basel: MDPI AG
  • Language: English
  • Identifier: ISSN: 2076-0752
    EISSN: 2076-0752
    DOI: 10.3390/arts12030097
  • Source: Open Access: DOAJ Directory of Open Access Journals
    AUTh Library subscriptions: ProQuest Central
    ROAD: Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources
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