ART REVIEW : Quiltmaking Show With the Feel of Jazz

“Who’d a Thought It: Improvisation in African-American Quiltmaking” is an exhibition with a demonstrative title and a point to make. Not all approaches to the familiar folk art of quiltmaking are the same, the show insists; hitherto obscured is a venerable tradition particular to American descendants of the African diaspora. Who, indeed, would have thought it?

The exhibition’s slangy title was taken from the impromptu name given to one quilt in the show, which was organized by the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum and is now concluding a 3 1/2-year tour at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Pieced by Francis Sheppard in 1986 and quilted by Irene Bankhead the following year, the bedcover is in the shape of an irregular square (its four sides are slightly curved) whose concentric pattern of strips of black cloth alternating with patched, multicolored zigzags is crisscrossed by a big X.

Here’s the hitch: Only three of the four arms of the X are anchored to the corners of the square, where you might expect them all to be. The fourth veers off by at least a foot, giving the otherwise regular pattern a visual kick that sends it spinning like a pinwheel. The outward spin is enhanced by the slight curves in the sides of the square, which make the concentric bars resemble ripples from a stone dropped into a pond.

The name of this unusual quilt wittily zeroes in on the larger tradition the show means to identify. A pattern that would have been stable, uniform and static has been transformed into an exuberant, mobile, improvisatory surprise. Who’d a thought it?

This improvisational style isn’t the same as that of so-called crazy quilts, in which fabric remnants are sewn together helter-skelter without regard to pattern, form, rhythm or composition. Instead, improvisations are light on their feet, adapting to the specific, ever-changing context as the making of the quilt goes along, rather like a storyteller making up a tale from scratch. A definite rhyme and reason mark the scheme, even if their source can’t immediately be detected.

To borrow the terminology of jazz, the concentric squares of the “Who’d a Thought It” quilt’s background form a riff, or a basic theme composed from a constantly repeated phrase, while the freewheeling X is like a solo improvisation that plays across the riff and sets the whole thing soaring. Jazz and blues and scat and gospel and other musical forms common to black culture are, in many respects, the aural equivalent to the visual style of improvisation that the exhibition demonstrates.

That demonstration is concise. The show features just 28 quilts, most dating from the past 50 years, and all are from the Oakland collection of Eli Leon. (Several of the more than 300 quilts in Leon’s collection were seen at the California Afro-American Museum in 1986.) But the selections do their job well, offering a good introduction to the subject while articulating a number of salient points.

One is that using the most familiar traditions of white American quiltmaking as the standard by which to judge the African-American quilts in the show inevitably means the latter will come up short. Erroneously, they’ll seem filled with mistakes, disabilities, errors in form, judgment and compositional skill. Emma Hall’s 1940 design for a “Double Wedding Ring” quilt, and Mattie Pickett’s for a 1986 “Texas Star” show why. Each takes considerable license with a famous traditional quilt pattern.

The poised, geometric regularity of delicately linked, often flowery circles in a standard “Double Wedding Ring” is pretty much maintained by Hall. Visually, however, the staid delicacy has been transformed into boisterous revelry by her eccentric colors and percussive, internal patterns. The quilt evokes a festive wedding reception more than a genteel wedding service.

Pickett’s revolves around a rich but highly ordered central starburst, in typical fashion, but there all similarities with a common “Texas Star” cease. Beyond the central pattern, out at the margins, a wild galaxy of tumbling stars explodes the symmetrical regularity common to its counterpart among white quilters. Pickett’s “Texas Star” is ecstatic, not stately.

That these improvisations on standard designs are anything but errors in composition or failures of technical skill is made plain in a rare, double-sided “strip” quilt, anonymously made in the 19th Century. One side is perfectly regular and symmetrical, exquisitely sewn with every stitch in place, but the other is a fanciful, equally deft improvisation on the strip motif. Both are remarkable.

This 19th-Century example--the only one in the show--also means to suggest a direct link across time and continents to African traditions that were forcibly carried across the Atlantic by the slave trade. Rosie Lee Tomkins’ dazzling, 1985 concatenation of pieced velvets is convincingly related to the so-called “flexible patterning” of African raffia embroideries. In the exhibition, a small selection of cloths from Ghana, Nigeria and Zaire--modern states that correspond to the Central African regions from which most slaves were taken--show patterns that echo formal and conceptual structures, if not outright styles, of those pieced by modern African-American quiltmakers.

Drawing links between the African-American piecing of velvet scraps and the patterning of bark cloth painted by Pygmy women in Haut Zaire is a complex business. (If you want to try it yourself, follow a trip to the Long Beach Museum with a visit to the Margo Leavin Gallery in West Hollywood, where, coincidentally, an exhibition of decorated Pygmy bark cloth has lately gone on view.) As “Who’d a Thought It” makes plain, the cataloguing of motifs and the reconstruction of the paths taken in the evolution of the tradition are projects only just begun. The African side of the equation needs to be fleshed out.

The American side, by contrast, is fully in evidence. Music critic Gene Santoro has said that the broad collection of musical idioms we call jazz, which are united by their common embrace of improvisation, are avatars of the quintessentially American practice of self-invention. So are these often amazing quilts. They celebrate established tradition, while simultaneously using it as a backdrop against which their own hitherto unheard-of songs are visually sung.

* At the Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., (213) 439-2119, to Sept. 8. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.