Rosie Lee Tompkins’ Mesmerizing Quilts on Grand Display at BAMPFA

The quilts featuring the metallic fabrics that Tompkins dubbed “Christmas” material draw you close, even as your senses register just how uncomfortable it would be to wrap oneself in these scratchy, shimmery surfaces. One from 1986, with yellow yarn ties punctuating a fragmented pinwheel pattern, balances light blue against gold, pillowy softness against the sheen of metal. It easily conjures the sparkly feeling of an angel-topped Christmas tree draped with tinsel and gently twinkling lights.

When looking at art—and writing about art—there’s an impulse to know as much as possible about the person responsible for the work. What were they like, why did they make this, what influenced them and how did they talk about it? Rosie Lee Tompkins was the pseudonym of Richmond resident Effie Mae Howard, who died at age 70 in 2006 and likely never wanted to answer such questions. The pseudonym was Leon’s idea, accepted by Howard to accommodate her intense desire for privacy while Leon championed her work in publication after publication, exhibition after exhibition. In Yau’s excellent essay, which respectfully details as much as can be known about Howard’s life and practice, sentences are frequently couched in phrases like “seems to” and “possibly” and “perhaps.”

Her art “drapes and stretches across any artistic hierarchy to which one might seek to hang [it] on,” Yau writes. Leon worked to create a context around Tompkins’ practice by linking African American quilting—particularly its more abstract compositions—to African textiles. But as Yau points out, not all of Tompkins’ quilts are abstract. Even pieces devoid of pictorial elements may be layered with embroidered text (Bible verses, “Effie,” the word “love”), or made up of colors Tompkins called “Three Sixes” (yellow, coral and purple), which represented three family members with sixes in their birthdates. Even a 2003 quilt made up of blocks of ties connotes a sense of personhood: a person, or people, once wore these around their necks.

And some of the most powerful—and enigmatic—pieces in the show incorporate imagery that carries with it the connotations of its original everyday or commemorative use: the American flag; calendars printed on fabric; a Kellogg’s bag; tourist souvenirs; a blanket bearing the portraits of JFK, MLK and RFK. One untitled piece from 1996 covered in embroidered Bible verses incorporates T-shirts featuring the faces of Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, O.J. Simpson and Nelson Mandela.

It is impossible to be definitive about certain aspects of Tompkins’ life and art, which poses interesting and potentially difficult questions for how this work is contextualized, historicized and exhibited moving forward. Here again, the quilts are elastic—they encompass an entire continuum between the designations of “lowly craft” and “high art.” They have moved from their maker’s home to flea markets to Leon’s collection to climate-controlled vertical museum display.

The effect her quilts have on people is easier to parse. In her exuberant color choices: joy. In the freedom of her designs, which nod to traditional quilt patterns, but remake them entirely: courage. And throughout, a sense of how Tompkins’ quilting was inextricable from her spirituality.

In the exhibition’s final gallery, Tompkins’ beliefs are stitched across nearly every quilt surface in crosses and Bible verses. After galleries of jewel-toned velvet and the sunny colors of “Three Sixes,” one of the final pieces in Rosie Lee Tompkins is a 96-inch tall black bedsheet with six rows of yo-yos (essentially, cinched fabric rosettes). Made in 2005, just a year before her death, it reads to me like a somber yet magnificent funeral shroud. Of course, I photographed that as well.

‘Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective’ is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive through July 18. Details here.