March 21, 2026
Far More Than Fabric: Recognizing Black Quiltmakers On National Quilt Day
Quilts are also cultural archives
National Quilt Day falls in March during Women’s History Month. It was established in 1991 by the National Quilting Association to pay homage to quilters across the country. While other art forms chronicle Black life and aesthetics, textile art carries this legacy just as effectively.
Black communities have used quilting not only as a necessity to keep warm in the cold winter months but also to adorn their homes, particularly beds and windows. Quilts are also cultural archives where many women create multidimensional stories of survival, migration, resistance, and joy through fabric. Black women quilters maintain the tradition by elevating it across the rural South and globally, in gallery spaces and museums, ensuring that African American stories are part of the fine art record and remain both remembered and felt as historical documents. Check out these Black women quilt makers who have led the charge.
Phyllis Stephens
Phyllis Stephens is an artist and storyteller who creates colossal-size quilts, with decades of skill and artistic practice in the tradition. Stephen’s large-scale works depict African Americans indulging in joy, love, pleasure, and spirituality. The master quilter works from Atlanta, while showing her work internationally. Stephens has shown work in Europe and across the African continent. Her quilts preserve authentic narratives and visuals of Black life to be experienced for generations to come.
Bisa Butler
Quilt artist Bisa Butler has transformed portraiture by using colorful African fabrics to make life-size textile artworks from archival photographs and ordinary Black subjects. Since the early 2000s, Butler’s work has been collected by major institutions, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. Butler’s pieces bring forward neglected histories by focusing on Black identity, dignity, and cultural expression.
Chawne Kimber
Through her work, Chawne Kimber has established quilting as an artistic and activist medium by creating strong textual pieces that address racial discrimination, social inequality, and systemic injustice. Since the 2000s, the Massachusetts-based artist and educator has combined mathematical exactness with social commentary in her quilt work. Kimber displays nationally, showing how traditional quilting transforms into a modern platform for cultural critique and contemporary discourse.
Cecelia Pedescleaux
Throughout a decades-long career, Cecelia Pedescleaux has dedicated herself to preserving African American heritage through quilting, combining African design traditions with historical narratives, including the Underground Railroad. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia, where she uses cultural symbolism in textile form. Pedescleaux also uses quilting as a storytelling method and a tool for protecting ancestral knowledge across generations.
Sally Mae Pettway Mixon
Sally Mae Pettway Mixon continues the Gee’s Bend legacy through improvisational quilts that are part of a multigenerational tradition that has achieved worldwide acclaim. Through her 21st-century artistic practice, Pettway Mixon uses recycled materials and bold geometric patterns to maintain a style that originated from necessity while protecting the cultural and familial histories of one of the most important African American quilting communities in the United States.
Carolyn L. Mazloomi
Since 1985, Carolyn L. Mazloomi has been instrumental in documenting and elevating Black quilting traditions. Mazloomi founded the Women of Color Quilters Network, which provides space for artists who have been excluded from mainstream recognition. Mazloomi has established African American quilting as an essential part of American art history through her narrative quilts and nationwide museum curatorial exhibitions while protecting its cultural value for future generations.
Wini McQueen
Wini McQueen, of Macon, Georgia, creates “story quilts” that combine words with images that tell stories about African American history, community life, and cultural experiences. McQueen’s quilts are tactile documentaries that can fill in the gaps in conventional historical records. For decades, her work has been displayed throughout the United States as a visual archive preserving cultural heritage.
RELATED CONTENT: Why Investing in Black Women’s Art is a Power Move
