Ora Clay: Thank you.
Alexis Madrigal: Thanks for joining us. We’re also joined by Elaine Yau, associate curator and academic liaison at the Berkeley Art Museum. She’s the creator of Rooted West, a new exhibit of African American quilts. Thanks for joining us.
Elain Yau: Thank you.
Alexis Madrigal: Elaine, this is part of your work and your life’s work to work with quilts. Why quilts? Like, what can a quilt do?
Elain Yau: It’s a great question. Quilts, I think, for artists, for quilt makers, offer a space for creativity that sort of just lives with you in your everyday lives. You can pick it up. You can put it down. It can fill the breaks in your life. It allows you to tell stories. And I think for the people who receive quilts and live with quilts, yeah, very practically, they provide warmth. They are sort of this object of comfort. And, it can travel with you. And I think because it can travel with you, it sort of accumulates, the kinds of memories that might you might hold in your own mind, but it’s sort of externalized. And, I kinda love that about it.
Alexis Madrigal: Ora, for you, tell us about what a quilt actually is, like, the kind of different parts physically, of a quilt.
Ora Clay: When we talk about a quilt, it’s really three layers. There is the top layer, and that’s where you do your design or your piecing. And that’s the layer that most people see. But then there is a middle layer, which is sort of like the, where you get your warmth. You know? It is like the curtain part is the batting. It’s the soft part of the quilt. And then you have the back, which is the back of the quilt. And I just want to say, you don’t usually see the back, but in this exhibition that’s at the Berkeley Art Museum, Some of the quilts are hung so that we can see the backs, and we often want to see that back. But anyway, those three layers are then quilted, and we use these terms interchangeably. But the quilting is actually holding these three layers together. When we did the top layer, that was the piecing or the, you know, the designing of the composing. But the quilting part is holding these three layers together.
Alexis Madrigal: And could any fabric be used for the piecing for the front? And what normally would get stuffed in the middle, the warm part?
Ora Clay: Any fabric can be used for the quilting I mean, for the piecing on top, taking into account that different fabrics act differently. And in the exhibit, there are quilts with velvet. But for a quilter, when you’re piecing, you do a lot of earning. And if you earn velvet, you get a different look to it.
Alexis Madrigal: What does it do?
Ora Clay: Sometimes it mats or it’s not to be used with a hot iron. So that’s why in quilting, sometimes we don’t use a lot of velvet. But if you want that effect, then, yes, you can use velvet or any other kind of embellishment. Again, take into account, you know, what it will do if you put an iron to it. So, so, yes, you can.
Alexis Madrigal: Elaine, this exhibit pulls from the permanent collection of quilts, which are now at the museum. You know, we have this passionate collector. We’re gonna talk about it a little bit later. Talk to me about, like, kind of the variety of quilts and and sort of why you wanted to pull them together around this kind of theme of rootedness and rooting, like, routing, but also rooting.
Elain Yau: So the exhibition really is intended to foreground a real diversity of styles and construction techniques. Visitors to the show can see quilts made out of worn and used work clothes in the quilting community that are usually called britches quilts. You’ll see pattern based quilts that are really, precision finished. All the points, all the corners are really perfectly matched up. The quilting that Ora was describing is really exquisite. You’ll also see quilts that are much looser, that are more improvisationally put together from almost disparate fabrics that create these unexpected juxtapositions and novel materials. So Ora mentioned velvets, but there are satins. There is ripstop nylon, denim, of course, cotton. So really an array. And so your other question was about why rootedness?
You know, sifting through this massive collection, I really didn’t know what the organizing concept would be, but I knew I wanted it to be more than just a greatest hits. We have over three thousand African American made quilts. I really wanted audiences to understand, and I wanted to understand, what kind of history binds them together. So this notion of rootedness in terms of, like, home place, of knowing where one’s origins are, is so much a part of African American quilt history in terms of the ways that quilts begin in the home. And then as the story of the great migration implies, people are leaving home, going to new places, wanting to establish themselves, seeking fortunes and seeking mobility. And they’re carrying these quilts with them. So I just simply wanted to know what it was about quilts that make them that made them so valuable and cherished over time.
Alexis Madrigal: Ora, I mean, you were part of this migration too. Right?
Ora Clay: Right. As Elaine was talking, I was thinking she’s telling my story already. Yeah. I was born in Alabama and I came as a teenager.
Alexis Madrigal: Tiny little town. Right? I was looking it up.
Ora Clay: Well, it’s twenty miles from Tuskegee, if you know where Tuskegee is and fifty miles from Montgomery. So those are our points, you know, because I was born in Union Springs, Alabama, so you wouldn’t know Union Springs. But, but, anyway, as Elaine was saying, I came to California when I was sixteen, and I got on a train, all by myself, to come to California because California had free college. And I think that’s what people did. They moved to find a better place, and for me, it was to find a way to be able to go to college. So I came to California and went to a free little junior college. And with me, I brought my mother a quilt to bring and that was representative of home for me. And, in my quilt at the museum and the exhibition is about this journey because when I got on that train at sixteen, it was by myself. I’d never left Alabama before this, and I’m coming across the country to California. I had no idea what I had in store for me. But in my quilt at the museum, I wanted to remember and honor the Pullman porters because I’m sitting on this train, and the Pullman porters were hired, you know, for the rich people who rode the trains. But as they walked through the train, there were people that looked like me, and so they would check on me and say, how are you doing? You know, do you need anything? So I felt that I was, someone was looking after me. I wasn’t all by myself. So my quilt includes the Pullman porters. And also in California, in in, Oakland, the Pullman porters were
Alexis Madrigal: Big union.
Ora Clay: Organized a right as a union. And I understand Ronald Dellums’ father was part of that movement. So, you know, as I said, I brought a quilt with me that stayed with me all of these years. I used it over and over again, and after a while, it could no longer be used on the bed because, you know, they had some worn spots and were sort of falling apart. So I used the corner of that quilt as the foundation for my quilt in the muse for my quilt in the museum and used an applique to have the Pullman porters, images, images of my mother. Also, on that trip and and and traveling, we always took a shoe box of food because we didn’t know where we would be able to eat at a restaurant. So I have a shoebox on my quilt and,
Alexis Madrigal: Do you remember what was in your lunch?
Ora Clay: Yes. We always had fried chicken and pound cake because those were things that could last a couple of days. And, Saturday when I was at the museum, there were ladies, oh, yes. I remember carrying that shoe box full of food. So that was a memory for, you know, people looking at the quilt and a memory for people who migrated or traveled during that time. So, so, yes, that is my story.
Alexis Madrigal: What a story. Yeah. What a bold person at that, you know. Was there anything special about the batting or the backing that you wanna make?
Ora Clay: Well, in my quilt that my mother made, one question quilt always gets is, how long does it take to make a quilt? And that question may be coming up in how long does it take to make a quilt? But I thought I always reference my mother, and I wrote an article in quote folk magazine about this, about how long does it take. Well, for the batting in my mother’s quilts, she didn’t go and buy batting like I can do. She had to plant the cotton, grow the cotton, harvest the cotton. My father took the cotton to the gin to remove the seeds from the cotton, brought it home, and she had to stretch the cotton for the batting. So in the quilt that I have in the museum in the exhibition, part of it is frayed. So you can see some of that kind that was you that is or was used in the quilts. So, Wow. That’s the, you know, say and that’s how long it took her to make a quilt if you count on that time.
Alexis Madrigal: Seasons worth.
