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. "[1] More than 500 works by Tompkins reside at the Berkeley Art Museum. 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. You should see what she does with color!”. 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. Rosie Lee Tompkins, extraordinary quilter we need to know. 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. Tompkins elicits emotion by stripping away casual relationships in favor of intensity. Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective, now on display at BAMPFA in Berkeley, marks the largest and most comprehensive exhibition ever presented of … It was overflowing not only his house, but also a small, climate-controlled annex he had built behind it. Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on WhatsApp Email Print 1480 words. Do you think that polyester double knit might look cheap used in a quilt? 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. Publisher. 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. The New York Times on Saturday posted a beautiful article on Rosie Lee Tompkins, the California quilter … It shows small individual adjustments made and liberties taken, almost granular expressions of imagination and freedom. 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. 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. 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. 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. She was actually Effie Mae Martin Howard, an Arkansas-born mother, grandmother, and practical nurse who loved piecing quilts. “I think it’s because I love them so much that God let me see all these different colors,” Tompkins once said of her patchworks. Rosie Lee Tompkins at BAMPFA. Image: Rosie Lee Tompkins, Untitled, 1970s, with embroidered scripture added mid-1980s; quilted by Irene Bankhead, 1997. 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. “Rosie Lee Tompkins was an astonishingly original and visionary artist whose work delivers a powerful visual, emotional, and even spiritual experience,” said Rinder. In one, several blocks of stark black and white triangles break through an expanse of rich colors like icebergs in a dark sea. 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. Rosie Lee Tompkins Anthony Meier Fine Arts Rosie Lee Tompkins, Untitled, ca. More and more I saw her as a great American artist, no qualifier needed. “I hope they spread a lot of love.”. In 1997, writer Roberta Smith happened on the first solo show anywhere of Rosie Lee Tompkins, an exemplar of one of the country’s premier visual traditions: African-American improvisational quilt-making — an especially innovative branch of a medium that reaches back to African textiles and continues to thrive. 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. They gave off a tangible heat. 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. 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. 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