Exploring the Women of Color Quilters Network through SAAM’s collection:
In the early 1970s, when Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi was working on her very first quilt, she couldn’t find any cotton batting to complete the project, so she decided to head to the drugstore, buy cotton, and make her own. She bought about a dozen boxes of rolled cotton sheets that were designed for first aid. At home, she realized she needed more and returned to the pharmacy a few more times. During the last visit, the pharmacist approached her with a look of concern and said, “I don’t know who is sick in your home, but I think you had better get them to the hospital, now!” Little did he know that the patient was a quilt.
Mazloomi’s creative practice has come a long way since that first quilt, which she still has (and asks her children not to show to anyone.) She first fell in love with quilts as a child. Her grandmother, who lived in rural Louisiana, made quilts. She remembers how the women in her family cast their eyes over her grandmother’s quilts and recognized fragments of their clothing—a dress or a skirt—that were incorporated onto the panels. “I remember those quilts vividly,” Mazloomi says, “The memories that the textile holds is important.” Generations later, Mazloomi’s own quilts, primarily done in black-and-white, often address, “some facet of African American history or the status of women and how I am involved with my family.” It all depends, she adds, “on what I’m interested in at the moment.”
Mazloomi describes herself as an elder African American woman, born and raised in the Jim Crow segregated south—a wife, mother, and grandmother, as well as an artist. When quilt making became central to her life, she began to wonder who else was making quilts that reflected her life and experiences. “In my travels I would see quilts for sale, but I never saw African American quiltmakers. I wondered, ‘Where are all the quiltmakers? I see the quilts, but I don’t see the makers.’” She put an advertisement in a national quilt magazine and asked that any African American quiltmakers reading the magazine contact her.
"I love quilts. I love art. I want to be surrounded by it. I want to be involved in the making of it. I want to be involved in the lives of the people that make it in my network."—Carolyn Mazloomi
Meet the Artist: Caroline Mazloomi on YouTube:
