The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is organizing an exhibition of more than one hundred quilts by approximately eighty artists, the most expansive presentation to date of a transformative bequest of African American quilts that the museum received in 2019. Opening in Berkeley next year, Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California is a groundbreaking historical survey of the relationship between quiltmaking traditions and the history of Black migration to California from the Southern United States. The exhibition highlights the ongoing work of an ambitious multi-year initiative that BAMPFA has undertaken to research, catalog, and conserve the nearly three thousand African American quilts and several hundred unattributed quilts in its care, which are believed to comprise the largest collection of its kind.
The curator of this exhibit, Dr. Elaine Lau, earned her Ph.D. from Berkeley's Department of Art History in 2015 and was co-curator of BAMPFA's 2020 retrospective on the works of Rosie Lee Tomkins. For Routed West, Yau has conducted unprecedented research into the provenance of the quilts in the exhibition. Working with Curatorial Associate Matthew Miranda, Yau has been working to establish channels of communication with individual quilt artists and their surviving family members. Yau is also the editor of an exhibition catalog that will be published next spring in conjunction with the opening of Routed West, the first scholarly publication dedicated to African American quilting practices in California.