With One Astonishing Gift, a Berkeley Art Museum Has Become an International Hub for African American Quilts—See Highlights Here

“It’s not often that a museum receives a gift that, in a single
stroke, creates a new, defining institutional strength,” Lawrence
Rinder, director and chief curator of the UC Berkeley Art Museum &
Pacific Film Archive, said last week. But this is precisely what
happened when the late collector and Oakland-based psychologist Eli
Leon bequeathed his collection of some 3,000 African American
quilts, instantly transforming the California museum into an
international hub for the genre.

In his New York Times
obituary, Roberta Smith describes Leon, who died in March 2018,
as “an obsessive collector—or, perhaps more accurately, a highly
discriminating hoarder,” who packed his home in Oakland to the
gills with treasures, including some 30 meat grinders,
knick-knacks, and, of course, an unparalleled trove of handmade
quilts.

The gift to BAMPFA—which the museum only learned about after his
death—includes work by Laverne Brackens, Gladys Henry, and, most
importantly, more than 500 examples by the artist Rosie Lee
Tompkins, whom Leon met in 1985 and championed for the rest of his
life. The museum is now in the process of researching the entire
collection, which has not been comprehensively catalogued until
now.

In 1987, the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum exhibited
Leon’s quilts in “Who’d a Thought It: Improvisation in African
American Quiltmaking,” which went on to travel throughout the
country. After seeing a show organized by Leon, Rinder himself
included Tompkins’s work in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and later put
on the first solo show dedicated to the artist at BAMPFA, where
many of her works will now live for good.

The bequest will form the basis of a retrospective devoted to
Rosie Lee Tompkins opening at the museum on February 19, and, in
2022, another exhibition detailing the breadth of the gift will
present works by Sherry Byrd, Willia Ette Graham, and Arbie
Williams, among others.

See examples from the vibrant collection below.

The post With One Astonishing Gift, a Berkeley Art Museum
Has Become an International Hub for African American Quilts—See
Highlights Here appeared first on artnet News.