Then, several months later, came the amazing news: Eli had bequeathed his entire quilt collection to the Berkeley Art Museum, a tribute to the early advocacy of Mr. Rinder. During this time she married and divorced Ellis Howard, raised five children and stepchildren and started to make quilts to sell at the area’s many flea markets, along with other wares. 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. Tompkins elicits emotion by stripping away casual relationships in favor of intensity. Other women finished the quilts by adding a layer of wadding and the back, a standard practice. The opposite corner features a distinctive Tompkins device: a small framed area composed of tiny squares that creates a quilt-within-a-quilt — which reads as a witty self-reference to the quilting process, and pulls us into the intimacy of making. Initially she seemed to belong to the first rank of outsider artists who began reshaping the American art canon around 1980, such geniuses as Martín Ramírez, Bill Traylor and Joseph Yoakum. Here are feelings of awe, elation, and sublimity; here is an absolute mastery of color, texture and composition; here is inventiveness and originality so palpable and intense that each work seems like a new and total risk, a risk so extreme that only utter faith in the power of the creative spirit could have engendered it. Eli had also worked as a graphic designer and sometime in the late 1970s, after years of haunting the area’s flea markets and yard sales for whatever appealed, he zeroed in on the visual vibrancy of quilts, evolving into a self-taught scholar. An image provided by Eli Leon, Rosie Lee Tompkins in 1985. A remarkable early quilt from the 1970s is pieced almost entirely of blocks of found fabric embroidered with flowers — old and new, machine- and handmade. 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. (They had met as students at Reed College and married, even though they both knew he was gay. The textile of hers that jumped out at Mr. Rinder is impressive even in photographs. Think again. After a final decade that was a nearly vertical trajectory, hurtling toward art world fame, Rosie Lee Tompkins died suddenly, at 70, in December 2006, in her home. "[14][1], She was married and divorced twice. His promotional efforts, however, did not involve much selling: Eli was almost congenitally incapable of parting with any of his quilts, or anything else, that he accumulated. Photograph courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Rosie Lee Tompkins was a pseudonym, I would learn, adopted by a fiercely private, deeply religious woman, who as her work received more and more attention, was almost never photographed or interviewed. By Elaine Y. Yau, Lawrence Rinder and Horace Ballard, Williams College curator of American art. [17], Rinder, Lawrence (1997). Rosie Lee Tompkins is an artist who practiced meditation as quilting, who speaks directly to the current chaotic world of stay-at-home orders and social distance, our yearning for meaning. In this medley of blue denims, Tompkins pays homage to her grandfather, a farmer, and her sons, with scraps of worn overalls and the pockets and labels of jeans of more recent vintage. An incredible retrospective of Rosie Lee Tompkins with 62 quilts and five assemblage-like memory jugs was staged last year at BAMPFA. They come at us with the force and sophistication of so-called high art, but are more democratic, without any intimidation factor. “Drawing on the rich history of quilting in the African American community, Tompkins’s formally and technically innovative work also defies conventions and expectations. Print length. She studied nursing, and for the next two decades or so worked in convalescent homes, a job she is said to have loved. "[6], Critics were equal in their praise: "Tompkins' textile art [works] ... demolish the category";[7] "These quilts are works of such distinction and devotion that they supersede established art-historical categories, forcing reviewers to retreat to that dumbfounded admiration that attracted us to art in the first place". More and more I saw her as a great American artist, no qualifier needed. Publication date. He put three of her quilts in the show, one of which the Whitney acquired. Publisher. But the “self-taught” or “outsider” labels were inaccurate for quilters. In doing so, he contributed to the national awareness of quilts of all kinds by African-Americans, which have been increasingly studied and exhibited since around 1980, thanks to the combined influences of the civil rights movement, feminism and multiculturalism. Their unbridled colors, irregular shapes and nearly reckless range of textiles telegraphed a tremendous energy and the implacable ambition, and confidence, of great art. In Arkansas he visited Rosie Lee’s mother, Sadie Lee Dale, and bought one of her quilts, too. Tompkins seems to have been an artist of singular greatness, but who knows what further revelations — including the upcoming survey of the Eli Leon Bequest — are in store. The flea markets were a quilter’s paradise in the 1970s, ’80s and beyond, places where the necessary materials were plentiful and cheap: printed, embroidered and sequined fabrics, beaded trim, crocheted doilies, needlepoint, buttons, secondhand clothing, costume jewelry — all of which, and more, Tompkins incorporated into her art. A typical Tompkins quilt had an original, irresistible aliveness. The planets had aligned: I’d 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. In 1997 I walked into the Berkeley Art Museum to be greeted by a staggering sight: an array of some 20 quilts unlike any I had ever seen. 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. Spread out in the museum’s sky-lighted galleries, the work’s beauty is more insistent than ever. See all formats and editions Hide other formats and editions. Rosie Lee Tompkins Anthony Meier Fine Arts Rosie Lee Tompkins, Untitled, ca. Likewise. Produced by Alicia DeSantis, Gabriel Gianordoli, Laura O’Neill and Josephine Sedgwick. But she heard voices, believed that her phone was tapped, and never arrived at the peace she so desired. Rosie Lee Tompkins Unknown Binding – January 1, 1997 by Lawrence Rinder (Author) 3.0 out of 5 stars 1 rating. It appropriated whole dish towels printed with folkloric scenes, parts of a feed sack, and, most prominently, bright bold chunks of the American flag. Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006). He also wanted to promote it, devising Rosie Lee Tompkins as her “art” name, to preserve her privacy. His dementia was much further along but he smiled as Ms. Hurth introduced me to another dimension of Tompkins’s creativity: the words and numbers that she awkwardly whipstitched to her quilts, adding a layer of personal meaning in a spidery script that sometimes resembled graffiti done with a Rapidograph. Anthony Meier Fine Arts will present a solo exhibition of never-before-seen works by renowned American artist Rosie Lee Tompkins(1936–2006), considered one of … Rosie Lee Tompkins, extraordinary quilter we need to know. "[11], In 2019, as a bequest, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) acquired the Eli Leon Collection of almost 3,000 works by African-American quilt makers, including more than 500 works by Tompkins, which will find a permanent home at the museum. Interest and support are coming forth: The museum has already received a $500,000 grant from the Luce Foundation for a follow-up survey of Eli’s entire gift in 2022, which should be every bit as surprising as this one. Then, in 2013, Eli began to leave me urgent phone messages: “You have to come out here. Over the years, I would be repeatedly blown away by work that was at once rigorous and inclusive. This past June, Roberta Smith wrote an intensive article on Tompkins and the show. More than 500 works by Tompkins reside at the Berkeley Art Museum. 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. [8], Works pieced by Tompkins include Tents of Armageddon Four Patch (1986),[9] Three Sixes (1987), Half-Squares Put-Together (1988), Half-Squares Medallion (1986), Half-squares Four-patch (1986), and Put Together with Letter "F" (1985). They closed in one world and will reopen in a very different one, and the relevance of “Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective” has only expanded in the hiatus. As with Ohr, Tompkins’s work triggered a kind of joy on first encounter. She all but abandoned pattern for an inspired randomness with an emphasis on serial disruptions that constantly divert or startle the eye — like the badge of a California prison guard sewn to an otherwise conventional crazy quilt. 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. Rosie Lee Tompkins was a pseudonym, I would learn, adopted by a fiercely private, deeply religious woman, who as her work received more and more attention, was almost never photographed or interviewed. Tompkins was an inventive colorist whose generous use of black added to the gravity of her efforts. Around 1980, Eli turned his gimlet eye to searching out African-American quilts and interviewing their makers. UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Eli Leon Bequest; Sharon Risedorph. A rugged appliquéd quilt begun in 1968, completed in 1996, celebrates California, Tompkins’s adopted state, with tourist trinkets, starlet-worthy rhinestone trim, beaded embroideries and in the lower right corner, what seems to be the back of a jacket embroidered with an image of Native Americans. Eli made three trips to the South — on a Guggenheim grant in one instance — to meet the relatives of quilters he knew and collected around Oakland. Another narrative quilt is more like a wall-hanging, or maybe a street mural, pieced with large fragments of black and white fabric and T-shirts printed with images of African-American athletes and political leaders. Her abstract, improvisational compositions often had a personal significance: one of her more well-known works, "Three Sixes," involves three relatives whose birthdays include the number 6. (Eli was not shy about his considerable brilliance.) “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. The final count of the Eli Leon Bequest was 3,100 quilts by over 400 artists. Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective marks the first exhibition at BAMPFA of Tompkins’s work since this transformative bequest, and it includes dozens of quilts that have never been exhibited previously. ‘Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective’ — By Elaine Y. Yau, Lawrence Rinder and Horace Ballard (University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive): The catalog to the first retrospective of the quilt artist Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936-2006) is essential to familiarity with the achievements of superlative 20th-century artists who never set foot in the art world. I need help,” his thin reedy voice said. Sometimes the embroidery reflected her daily Bible reading, including the Gospels, as did her addition of appliqué crosses. 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. The first work I ever saw by Rosie Lee Tompkins was in an exhibition titled Showing Up , at the Richmond Art Center, in a town just north of Berkeley, California. Cooke is senior curator for special projects at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. At flea markets he would approach anyone selling anything to ask if they knew of quilts for sale. She was reclusive and fiercely protective of her privacy and the right to privacy of family. Some feature abutting triangles that suggest desert landscapes and pyramids, perhaps the Flight into Egypt. She died aged 70. The curator of the Berkeley show, Lawrence Rinder, wrote: In front of Tompkins's work I feel that certain Modernist ambitions may in fact be achievable. Like Rosie Lee, they were artists of color. While works like this one relate to Pop Art, others had the power of abstraction. Here a quilt top, folded in half, is held by bulldog clips fastened to the molding. Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective is the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work to date, featuring approximately seventy quilts, pieced tops, embroideries, assemblages, and decorated objects. (Others, like Henry Darger and James Castle, were white.) They were the jewels in the crown of a collection of African-American quilts that would eventually number in the thousands. It would be gratifying to learn that she did not act alone. On the plane out to San Francisco in February, I read the exhibition catalog cover to cover. It reveals Tompkins to be an artist of extraordinary variety, depth, and impact. They were also included in the 2002 Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art and have been shown at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC; one image is available on their web site. He lived frugally in a small bungalow in Oakland that was eventually packed to its rafters with quilts, except for his dining room and kitchen. The museum’s website currently offers a robust online display and 70-minute virtual tour. Ohr’s precariously thin-walled vessels, unlikely shapes and inspired glazing shared a kind of bravura with Tompkins’s works. As a result her quilts could be deliriously akimbo, imbued with a mesmerizing pull of differences and inconsistencies that communicates impassioned attention and care. As New York Times critic Roberta Smith put it, “Tompkins’s textile art [works]…demolish the category.”. The BAMPFA exhibition catalog presents the quilts and found-object art of Rosie Lee Tompkins through brilliant photos and thoughtful essays. What else? 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. But even they couldn’t prepare me for the visual force of the 62 quilts and five assemblage-like memory jugs, dating from the 1970s to 2004. Eli died on March 6, 2018, at 82, in an assisted-living home. And Horace D. Ballard, a former divinity student who is now a curator and art historian at Williams College and its museum, writes that Tompkins “lived in service of a higher calling,” tying her efforts to sacred music, texts and architecture. A deeper understanding and knowledge of these, especially where art is concerned, must be part of the necessary rectification and healing that America faces. "Rosie Lee Tompkins at Anthony Meier Fine Arts". [12][13] Drawing from the Eli Leon Collection, BAMPFA organized the exhibit Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective (opened February 19, 2020; closed due to COVID-19 shut-down; re-opens September through December 20, 2020); The New York Times called it "a triumphal retrospective" that "confirms her standing as one of the great American artists–transcending craft, challenging painting and reshaping the canon. The New York Times called her "one of the great American artists," and her work "one of the century’s major artistic accomplishments. Cotton, cotton flannel and silk crepe with beads and sequins are among the fabrics that turn this small quilt from 2002 into an almost Cubist landscape of standing and floating crosses accompanied by the embroidered names of the Four Evangelists. Effie Mae Howard (1936-2006) was a recluse from Richmond, California … University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2020. In photographs, Rosie Lee looks tall, of regal posture. He had received a diagnosis of dementia, and was worried about what would become of his collection, which he wanted to keep intact. The organizers’ excellent essays included Mr. Rinder vividly relating Tompkins’s use of improvisation to the innovations of Ornette Coleman and his “no-hold-barred free-jazz sensibility.” (Although he notes that she was an opera fan who listened to disco while doing her work.). (It debuted briefly in February before the coronavirus lockdown.) This surface action, I discovered, reflected her constant improvisation: Tompkins began by cutting her squares (or triangles or bars) freehand, never measuring or using a template, and intuitively changed the colors, shapes and size of her fabric fragments, making her compositions seem to expand or contract. The question of their destiny hung uneasily in the air. Image: Rosie Lee Tompkins, Untitled, 1970s, with embroidered scripture added mid-1980s; quilted by Irene Bankhead, 1997. 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