"[1] More than 500 works by Tompkins reside at the Berkeley Art Museum. Born in Arkansas as Effie Mae Martin Howard (1936–2006), she was an African American woman who moved to Richmond, California when she was 22 and took a pseudonym to separate her art world quilts from her everyday life. In addition, the fabrics — variously elegant, every day and ersatz — bring a lot with them, not just color and texture, but also manufacturing techniques and social connotations. 1974, polyester double knit, acrylic yarn, crepe print, synthetic sheer polyester tablecloth, muslin, shot cotton, nylon-spandex kit, acrylic sweater knit, poly-cotton linen blend, polyester crepe, polyester woven cotton Christmas print, cotton thread, backed with cotton advertising print, 62 1/4 × 34 3/4". UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Eli Leon Bequest; Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times. See all formats and editions Hide other formats and editions. She worked in several styles and all kinds of fabrics, using velvets — printed, panne, crushed — to gorgeous effect, in ways that rivaled oil paint. This September many more people will have similar moments of their own, and feel the love implicit in her extraordinary achievement, when “Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective” — the artist’s largest show yet — opens its doors once more at the Berkeley Art Museum for a run through Dec. 20. Rosie Lee Tompkins Anthony Meier Fine Arts Rosie Lee Tompkins, Untitled, ca. Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective Where : Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center St., Berkeley When : 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays; closes July 19 Her abstract, improvisational compositions often had a personal significance: one of her more well-known works, "Three Sixes," involves three relatives whose birthdays include the number 6. More and more I saw her as a great American artist, no qualifier needed. Mr. Rinder’s Rosie Lee Tompkins conversion took place in a show of black and white quilts by African-Americans that Eli organized in 1996 at the Richmond Art Center. Rosie Lee Tompkins’s version of what Eli Leon called “flexible patterning” may have been more extreme than anyone else’s. Eli’s devotion to her work made him a supplicant, willing to do anything — bring her fabrics and art books — to help with her work. "Greatness Near at Hand," in. Then, in 2013, Eli began to leave me urgent phone messages: “You have to come out here. “Rosie Lee Tompkins was an astonishingly original and visionary artist whose work delivers a powerful visual, emotional, and even spiritual experience,” said Rinder. Over the years, I would be repeatedly blown away by work that was at once rigorous and inclusive. In this masterpiece of velvet, velveteen, faux fur and panne velvet, Rosie Lee Tompkins conjures a night sky as the center of an altarpiece devoted to heaven itself. They were the jewels in the crown of a collection of African-American quilts that would eventually number in the thousands. On the plane out to San Francisco in February, I read the exhibition catalog cover to cover. @robertasmithnyt, Grid image credits: UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Eli Leon Bequest; Sharon Risedorph and Ben Blackwell. In a velvet quilt from 1992, the viewer is startled into closer attention by an eruption of black and white (upper right) in a field of rich colors and patch of small green and black squares framed in burnt orange, a quilt-within-a-quilt (lower left). "[11], In 2019, as a bequest, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) acquired the Eli Leon Collection of almost 3,000 works by African-American quilt makers, including more than 500 works by Tompkins, which will find a permanent home at the museum. At the time of the show, she was 61 and living in nearby Richmond, Calif., just north of Berkeley. Eli Leon in the annex he built at his Oakland cottage for his quilts. Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006). His promotional efforts, however, did not involve much selling: Eli was almost congenitally incapable of parting with any of his quilts, or anything else, that he accumulated. (Others, like Henry Darger and James Castle, were white.) Tompkins elicits emotion by stripping away casual relationships in favor of intensity. Above and to the right a circle of twisted bands and leaves suggests both a crown of thorns and a laurel wreath. ‘Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective’ — By Elaine Y. Yau, Lawrence Rinder and Horace Ballard (University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive): The catalog to the first retrospective of the quilt artist Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936-2006) is essential to familiarity with the achievements of superlative 20th-century artists who never set foot in the art world. The first work I ever saw by Rosie Lee Tompkins was in an exhibition titled Showing Up , at the Richmond Art Center, in a town just north of Berkeley, California. Rosie Lee Tompkins. In Arkansas he visited Rosie Lee’s mother, Sadie Lee Dale, and bought one of her quilts, too. She studied nursing, and for the next two decades or so worked in convalescent homes, a job she is said to have loved. Here a quilt top, folded in half, is held by bulldog clips fastened to the molding. There are many museum exhibitions on lockdown in the United States right now. And Horace D. Ballard, a former divinity student who is now a curator and art historian at Williams College and its museum, writes that Tompkins “lived in service of a higher calling,” tying her efforts to sacred music, texts and architecture. [8], Works pieced by Tompkins include Tents of Armageddon Four Patch (1986),[9] Three Sixes (1987), Half-Squares Put-Together (1988), Half-Squares Medallion (1986), Half-squares Four-patch (1986), and Put Together with Letter "F" (1985). She only ever met four people as the artist “Rosie Lee Tompkins” (curator Lawrence Rinder, Africanist Robert Farris Thompson, historian Glenna Matthews, and myself, since I am a quilt scholar). More wall-hanging or even street mural than quilt, this work from around 1996 juxtaposes images of black athletes and political leaders with crosses made of silk men’s ties to evoke the complexities of succeeding while black in America. The comments section is closed. It shows small individual adjustments made and liberties taken, almost granular expressions of imagination and freedom. She was reclusive and fiercely protective of her privacy and the right to privacy of family. Tompkins was an inventive colorist whose generous use of black added to the gravity of her efforts. This surface action, I discovered, reflected her constant improvisation: Tompkins began by cutting her squares (or triangles or bars) freehand, never measuring or using a template, and intuitively changed the colors, shapes and size of her fabric fragments, making her compositions seem to expand or contract. Here are feelings of awe, elation, and sublimity; here is an absolute mastery of color, texture and composition; here is inventiveness and originality so palpable and intense that each work seems like a new and total risk, a risk so extreme that only utter faith in the power of the creative spirit could have engendered it. Cotton flannel and beaded and sequined silk crepe might not be a winning combination? The Radical Quilting of Rosie Lee Tompkins. (They had met as students at Reed College and married, even though they both knew he was gay. 1 work in the Whitney’s collection. Her big velvet quilts — the exultant heart of the show — are most often disrupted by dramatic shifts in color and scale. R osie Lee Tompkins , born Effie Mae Martin in Gould, Arkansas in 1936, grew up picking cotton alongside her fourteen siblings and half-siblings. Each had survived a nervous breakdown or two; Rosie Lee’s, coming sometime in the late ’70s, deepened the spirituality and intensity of her work, making it more than ever a haven from the world. [2] Despite the fact that she was a deeply private person and rarely sold her quilts, her work was discovered in 1985 by Eli Leon, an Oakland-based collector specializing in African-American quilts. But even they couldn’t prepare me for the visual force of the 62 quilts and five assemblage-like memory jugs, dating from the 1970s to 2004. The New York Times called her "one of the great American artists," and her work "one of the century’s major artistic accomplishments." [17], Rinder, Lawrence (1997). With this visit, I joined a scattered group of individuals who had been seduced by Eli’s dedication but mainly by his collection, and were now concerned for its fate. Rosie Lee Tompkins at her home in Richmond, Calif., 1997. Publication date. The opposite corner features a distinctive Tompkins device: a small framed area composed of tiny squares that creates a quilt-within-a-quilt — which reads as a witty self-reference to the quilting process, and pulls us into the intimacy of making. Laverne Brackens, a well-known fourth-generation quilter in Texas, runs a close second, with around 300 quilts in the collection. They both possessed an extraordinary skill and idiosyncratic abandon that creates a new sense of the possibilities of the hand, visual wit and beauty in any medium. The New York Times on Saturday posted a beautiful article on Rosie Lee Tompkins, the California quilter … I mentioned her work in my writing when I could. Roberta Smith, the co-chief art critic, regularly reviews museum exhibitions, art fairs and gallery shows in New York, North America and abroad. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2020. It reveals Tompkins to be an artist of extraordinary variety, depth, and impact. Rosie Lee Tompkins, 1936–2006. As a child in rural Arkansas, she learned the southern African American quilting tradition from her mother. While works like this one relate to Pop Art, others had the power of abstraction. She was the only female artist I knew who seemed of their stature — perhaps beyond it — which was doubly exhilarating. Sometimes the embroidery reflected her daily Bible reading, including the Gospels, as did her addition of appliqué crosses. The sheer joy of her best quilts cannot be overstated. Rows of crosses made from men’s ties evoke the pressures of succeeding while black in America. She died aged 70. He lived frugally in a small bungalow in Oakland that was eventually packed to its rafters with quilts, except for his dining room and kitchen. As with Ohr, Tompkins’s work triggered a kind of joy on first encounter. In memory the show became a jubilant fugue of small squares of velvet in deep gemstone hues, dancing with not much apparent order yet impeccably arranged for full effect. But she was also adept with denim, faux furs, distressed T-shirts and fabrics printed with the faces of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jr. and Magic Johnson. A new awareness of her creations as true pieces of art, encompassing mast In photographs, Rosie Lee looks tall, of regal posture. In the #11 series, Artforum invites contributors to add one more thing to their 2020 Top 10 list.Here, Lynne Cooke discusses “Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective,” on view at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in California through July 18, 2021. A remarkable early quilt from the 1970s is pieced almost entirely of blocks of found fabric embroidered with flowers — old and new, machine- and handmade. His dementia was much further along but he smiled as Ms. Hurth introduced me to another dimension of Tompkins’s creativity: the words and numbers that she awkwardly whipstitched to her quilts, adding a layer of personal meaning in a spidery script that sometimes resembled graffiti done with a Rapidograph. In 2016, her quilts were featured in an exhibition of five quilt artists at the Oakland Museum of California.[5]. Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective is the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work to date, featuring approximately seventy quilts, pieced tops, embroideries, assemblages, and decorated objects. “Drawing on the rich history of quilting in the African American community, Tompkins’s formally and technically innovative work also defies conventions and expectations. Though I never met Tompkins, her quilts became stuck in my mind, sometimes at the forefront, sometimes in a corner. Ohr’s precariously thin-walled vessels, unlikely shapes and inspired glazing shared a kind of bravura with Tompkins’s works. To submit a letter to the editor for publication, write to. Was Tompkins aware of this possible reading? But within a year he began building a résumé of articles, exhibitions and lectures about the importance of African-American quilts as well as their frequent emphasis on improvisation and their links to African textiles. "[14][1], She was married and divorced twice. In doing so, he contributed to the national awareness of quilts of all kinds by African-Americans, which have been increasingly studied and exhibited since around 1980, thanks to the combined influences of the civil rights movement, feminism and multiculturalism. His 1987 show, “Who’d a Thought It: Improvisation in African-American Quiltmaking,” included a catalog essay by the well-known Africanist Robert Ferris Thompson alongside his own. Some people thought she might not exist, that Eli had made the quilts himself. The field of improvisational quilting by African-American women is not small, but beyond the great quilters of Gee’s Bend, Ala., and a few others, their work is not widely known. They bow to an ancient craft and, at the quilt’s center, a spare image of the risen Christ blessing. Rosie Lee Tompkins was a pseudonym, I would learn, adopted by a fiercely private, deeply religious woman, who as her work received more and more attention, was almost never photographed or interviewed. Sharon Risedorph Tompkins’ “Three Sixes”. She was born Effie Mae Martin in rural Gould, Ark., on Sept. 9, 1936. A deeper understanding and knowledge of these, especially where art is concerned, must be part of the necessary rectification and healing that America faces. Bits of embroidery, Mexican textiles, fabrics printed with flamenco dancers and racing cars, hot pink batik and, front and center, a slightly cheesy manufactured tapestry of Jesus Christ. I saw Eli once more, in 2016, when I went to Berkeley to review the inauguration of the museum’s new building. Rosie Lee and Eli were an odd pair, both willful, defensive and fragile. This early Rosie Lee Tompkins quilt from the ’70s is an ecumenical sampling of found embroideries of flowers — old, new, hand- and machine-made — which function as offerings to the center medallion showing the risen Christ, bearing the wounds of stigmata upon his hands. The BAMPFA exhibition catalog presents the quilts and found-object art of Rosie Lee Tompkins through brilliant photos and thoughtful essays. The area was also paradise for quilt collectors, one of whom was Eli, born in the Bronx in 1935 and trained as a psychologist, whose collecting instincts verged on hoarding. In one, several blocks of stark black and white triangles break through an expanse of rich colors like icebergs in a dark sea. Images courtesy of BAMPFA, Berkeley. Anthony Meier Fine Arts will present a solo exhibition of never-before-seen works by renowned American artist Rosie Lee Tompkins(1936–2006), It seemed like a map of the melting pot of American culture and politics. Rosie Lee Tompkins was the assumed name of Effie Mae Howard, a widely acclaimed African-American quiltmaker whose prodigious talents catapulted her to the forefront of contemporary art. What else? Print length. [12][13] Drawing from the Eli Leon Collection, BAMPFA organized the exhibit Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective (opened February 19, 2020; closed due to COVID-19 shut-down; re-opens September through December 20, 2020); The New York Times called it "a triumphal retrospective" that "confirms her standing as one of the great American artists–transcending craft, challenging painting and reshaping the canon. This past June, Roberta Smith wrote an intensive article on Tompkins and the show. Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective, now on display at BAMPFA in Berkeley, marks the largest and most comprehensive exhibition ever presented of … Some feature abutting triangles that suggest desert landscapes and pyramids, perhaps the Flight into Egypt. Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006) is the art pseudonym of Effie Mae Martin Howard, a widely-acclaimed African-American quiltmaker and fiber artist of Richmond, California. A typical Tompkins quilt had an original, irresistible aliveness. In a gallery in “Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective” at the Berkeley Art Museum, a quilt made mostly of double knit polyester (far left) holds its own against a quilt with a similar “house” motif in various kinds of velvet. They gave off a tangible heat. Previous page. (It was written about in the Home Section of The New York Times, but significantly not in the Art pages.). I visited him that fall, to be stunned all over again when Eli and Jenny Hurth — his exemplary friend, assistant, fellow quilt-lover and, after 2011, his most constant caregiver — unveiled a succession of Tompkins velvets, clipping them to the molding above the double doors between his living and dining rooms. Ms. Yau provides the foundational account of Tompkins’s life, her working methods and the role of family ties and religion. Rosie Lee Tompkins at BAMPFA. As New York Times critic Roberta Smith put it, “Tompkins’s textile art [works]…demolish the category.”. One day he asked a woman selling kitchen utensils — Effie Mae Howard. Photograph courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Or perhaps not. Cotton, cotton flannel and silk crepe with beads and sequins are among the fabrics that turn this small quilt from 2002 into an almost Cubist landscape of standing and floating crosses accompanied by the embroidered names of the Four Evangelists. The curator of the Berkeley show, Lawrence Rinder, wrote: In front of Tompkins's work I feel that certain Modernist ambitions may in fact be achievable. Tompkins — represented by more than 680 quilts, quilt tops, appliqués, clothing and objects — is undoubtedly the star. Organized by Lawrence Rinder, the museum’s chief curator, it helped boost her reputation beyond the quilt world centered in and around San Francisco. Her work is simply further evidence of the towering African-American achievements that permeate the culture of this country. Tompkins seems to have been an artist of singular greatness, but who knows what further revelations — including the upcoming survey of the Eli Leon Bequest — are in store. Rosie Lee Tompkins was a pseudonym, I would learn, adopted by a fiercely private, deeply religious woman, who as her work received more and more attention, was almost never photographed or interviewed. Perhaps, but the main point is that her work is open to the viewer’s response and interpretation. In 1997 I walked into the Berkeley Art Museum to be greeted by a staggering sight: an array of some 20 quilts unlike any I had ever seen. It resembles a wall hung with paintings. [15] Family included her mother; several children and stepchildren; and many siblings, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who survived her. Berkeley Art Museum. Wedging myself into the narrow gaps between the shelves of folded quilts in the annex, I got an inkling of how much I hadn’t seen. The museum’s website currently offers a robust online display and 70-minute virtual tour. Tompkins was intensely private. Anthony Meier Fine Arts will present a solo exhibition of never-before-seen works by renowned American artist Rosie Lee Tompkins(1936–2006), considered one of … One of Tompkins’s most spectacular velvets is edged with these framed mini-quilts, which surround an enormous field of blue velvets that creates a kind of van Gogh night sky; they can read as small painted side panels on an altarpiece. Though it began with Effie Mae Martin, it came to include a small, nervous collector named Eli Leon, who met her in 1985, fell in love with her quilts and those of many other African-American creators in and around Richmond — and devoted half his life to acquiring and studying, exhibiting and writing about their work. Eli Leon’s dining room in 2013 contained all manner of folk art collectibles, especially if they were a shade of jade green. In 1958 she joined the postwar phase of the Great Migration, relocating to Milwaukee and then Chicago, eventually settling in Richmond, Calif., a busy port and shipyard that had become a destination for thousands of African-Americans who moved out of the South, many bringing with them singular aspects of rural culture. Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective marks the first exhibition at BAMPFA of Tompkins’s work since this transformative bequest, and it includes dozens of quilts that have never been exhibited previously. No one quite knew the actual size of his holdings — Eli provided only the vaguest of numbers when asked — but it seemed immense, judging from the two- and three-foot-high stacks of quilts that had to be navigated to get through his darkened living room. Most of the pieces in this show were quilted by Irene Bankhead, whose work Eli also collected. It opened at the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum in 1987 and, over the next decade, toured to 25 museums — including the American Craft Museum in New York City in 1989. He also wanted to promote it, devising Rosie Lee Tompkins as her “art” name, to preserve her privacy. She all but abandoned pattern for an inspired randomness with an emphasis on serial disruptions that constantly divert or startle the eye — like the badge of a California prison guard sewn to an otherwise conventional crazy quilt. As a result her quilts could be deliriously akimbo, imbued with a mesmerizing pull of differences and inconsistencies that communicates impassioned attention and care. You should see what she does with color!”. There were obituaries in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Boston Globe. A triumphal retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum confirms her standing as one of the great American artists — transcending craft, challenging painting and reshaping the canon. The scraps of silk crepe, worthy of a flapper’s party dress, provide rhinestone angels above and the Mount of Olives below. They come at us with the force and sophistication of so-called high art, but are more democratic, without any intimidation factor. The organizers’ excellent essays included Mr. Rinder vividly relating Tompkins’s use of improvisation to the innovations of Ornette Coleman and his “no-hold-barred free-jazz sensibility.” (Although he notes that she was an opera fan who listened to disco while doing her work.). Their unbridled colors, irregular shapes and nearly reckless range of textiles telegraphed a tremendous energy and the implacable ambition, and confidence, of great art. "Howard" was a married name. Image: Rosie Lee Tompkins, Untitled, 1970s, with embroidered scripture added mid-1980s; quilted by Irene Bankhead, 1997. She reminded me of George Ohr, the unparalleled turn-of-the-century potter from Biloxi, Miss., whose work was rediscovered in the early 1970s. This exhibition, again organized by Mr. Rinder, the museum’s director until March, with Elaine Y. Yau, a postdoctoral curatorial fellow, marks the end of a 35-year saga. The information suggested talismanic properties, perhaps prayers. Rosie Lee Tompkins, 70, whose quilts hung in museums, graced the pages of art magazines and left awestruck critics scrambling to describe them, died Dec. 1 at her home in Richmond, Calif. Cooke is senior curator for special projects at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. That 1997 Berkeley show was my first Rosie Lee Tompkins moment. She said she believed God directed her hand and her art. One of her signature velvets might be described as a “failed checkerboard.” Its little squares of black and dark green, lime and blue, slide continuously in and out of register, creating the illusion of ceaseless motion, like a fractal model of rippling water. Please note that this is an extensive article. These were menageries of previous flea-market obsessions, artifacts of between-the-wars popular culture — crafts, milk glass, dolls, cookie tins, but also meat grinders, toasters and enamel saucepans — mostly in the jade greens. [2][3], Tompkins, who had helped her mother make quilts as a child, began to quilt seriously about 1980, while making a living as a practical nurse. Like Rosie Lee, they were artists of color. "Rosie Lee Tompkins at Anthony Meier Fine Arts". The show begins by demonstrating Tompkins’s unusual range and versatility, juxtaposing quilts in smoldering velvets with a medley of found denims — a homage to her grandfather and other farmers in her family. Think again. Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006) is the art pseudonym of Effie Mae Martin Howard, a widely-acclaimed African-American quiltmaker and fiber artist of Richmond, California. She even had a printed business card that offered “Crazy Quilts and Pillows All Sizes.” By the late 1970s, according to the current exhibition’s catalog, she was earning as much as $400 a weekend from sales and was able to quit her nursing job. Rosie Lee Tompkins is an artist who practiced meditation as quilting, who speaks directly to the current chaotic world of stay-at-home orders and social distance, our yearning for meaning. Produced by Alicia DeSantis, Gabriel Gianordoli, Laura O’Neill and Josephine Sedgwick. [16], Tompkins was found dead at her home in Richmond, California on Friday December 1, 2006. Do you think that polyester double knit might look cheap used in a quilt? ), Eli believed Rosie Lee was a great artist and at one point made notes about illustrating an essay about her with works by Michelangelo, Mondrian and Picasso. While fraught with obligations regarding care, storage, display and access that few museums, large or small, would take on, the bequest automatically transforms the Berkeley museum, and its parent institution, the University of California, Berkeley, into an unparalleled center for the study of African-American quilts. This reclusive woman, who hid from the public and who had no interest in public acclaim, created the stunning quilts, that were… I felt I had been given a new standard against which to measure contemporary art. Tompkins’s work, I came to realize, was one of the century’s major artistic accomplishments, giving quilt-making a radical new articulation and emotional urgency. By Elaine Y. Yau, Lawrence Rinder and Horace Ballard, Williams College curator of American art. Tompkins' quilts were featured in a solo exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in 1997, at Peter Blum Gallery in New York City in 2003, and at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont in 2007. Rosie Lee Tompkins, extraordinary quilter we need to know. She worked with the convention of the quilt block but with enormous variation in size, free distortions of shape and vivid color contrasts that have been described as "geometric anarchy" and "riotous mosaics. Language: English. The size of a small billboard, this 1996 quilt pieces together a folkloric dish towel, chunks of the American flag and a mass-produced tapestry of Jesus. The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Eli Leon Bequest was 3,100 quilts by adding a layer wadding... Selling kitchen utensils — Effie Mae Martin, she learned the southern African quilting... 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By Eli Leon in the early 1970s labels were inaccurate for quilters coronavirus lockdown ). Let on that she herself dabbled in the collection became her fan, eventually bequeathing his collection to gravity. Roberta Smith wrote an intensive article on Tompkins and the back, a standard practice by over 400 artists all... Berkeley show was my first thought was of Paul Klee, that had... S precariously thin-walled vessels, unlikely shapes and inspired glazing shared a kind joy! Finished the quilts knew he was gay in my writing when I could would be repeatedly away. Debt to do so and bought one of the pieces in this show were quilted by Irene Bankhead whose...