See the "Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California" Exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
From the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive: "Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California traces the flow and flourishing of quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration. As millions of African Americans sought greater opportunities and escape from the South’s oppressive racial environment from 1940 to 1970, they carried quilts as functional objects and physical reminders of the homes they left behind. The quilts in this exhibition explore the medium’s unique capacity for connecting kin across time and distance, holding memory and ancestral knowledge, and opening up space for beauty and artistic ingenuity."
More From the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive:
"Consisting of one hundred artworks representing nearly eighty individuals—many of them women with ties to the Bay Area—and recent works by local Black quilt artists, Routed West honors quiltmakers of this distinctive migrant generation and those who carry forth their aesthetic and cultural legacies. It is the first group exhibition of artworks drawn from the African American quilt collection at BAMPFA."
Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California will be on display at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California from June 8, 2025 through November 30, 2025.
Click Here, or the image below, to learn more about the exhibit.
(Below Photo - Installation view: Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, June 8–November 30, 2025. Photo by Daria Lugina)
