• 1940s-1950s　Texas
  cotton and flour sack back
• 213×168cm
• Collection of Corrine Riley/Courtesy of Ricco/
• Maresca Gallery

In 1975, at the opening of "THE GINZA," Shiseido presented an exhibit titled Americans Pieced Quilts, the first major exhibition of American quilting in Japan and an event that helped spark a quilting "boom" in Japan. Now, thirty years later, Shiseido introduces another new genre of beauty with a second quilting exhibition, this time featuring approximately twenty works by African-American quilters.

The quilts on display were created by women of African descent living in the American south. In contrast to the more orthodox quilting patterns traditionally used by European-descended quilters in the eastern and mid-western United States, those from the American south show a markedly different concept of beauty and aesthetic strength, particularly in their composition, color usage, and form-breaking dynamism and extemporaneity.

Simple, bold geometric compositions. A sense of asymmetry. Intense colors. A sense of lively "movement" created through the use of irregular stitching. An impromptu immediacy. With no models to work from and no repetitive reiteration — each quilt a one-time expression — African-American quilts have been compared to the music of jazz, another art form with ultimately African roots.Those early African-Americans, adapting to their encounter with a new language on a new continent, developed new musical forms like the harambee, spirituals, blues, and gospel, a corpus of musical expression that eventually evolved and refined itself to give rise to jazz. Like that music, the aesthetic expressions in these quilts also find their roots in that ongoing African-American experience.

The artisans, women with no formal artistic training, fashioned these quilts for their families using swatches of old clothing, fabric from discarded seed and fertilizer bags, and other miscellaneous bits of cloth. In the act of piecing together and sewing such works many undoubtedly discovered a certain quiet respite from their busy daily work, house chores, and childcare responsibilities, and it is not difficult to imagine the pleasure they took in the creativity of selecting and arranging the cloth pieces to their liking. We invite you to come experience for yourself the dynamic colors and rhythms, created with only needle, thread and cloth out of the daily lives of these African-American quilters, and entrusted with both their memories and their hopes.