About Us
WHY ARE WE HERE?
Our purpose is to inspire understanding of the social, cultural, and artistic significance of African-American quilts. Our goal is to document, research, and preserve African-American quilt history through data collection and collaboration with local, state, and national societies, museums and universities.
African American Quilt Documentation Study Group
African-American history, our contributions, and our achievements are often underrepresented, ignored, or even erased from mainstream historical narratives. This has led to gaps and fragmentation in the collective historical record of African Americans.
Many African-American quilts have no record of the quilt history or the quilt maker. In most cases, what is known has been handed down orally and not recorded anywhere. The African American Quilt Documentation Study Group was established to uncover, document, and research African-American quilt history with the goal of preserving our African-American quilting heritage.
Elaine Yau
MUSEUM LIASON & ADVISOR
Elaine Y. Yau is Associate Curator of the Eli Leon Living Trust Collection of African American Quilts at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA); where she curated Routed West: 21st Century African American Quilts in California, an exhibition from Leon’s historic bequest of approximately 3,000 quilts. She co-curated Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective in 2020 with Larry Rinder, an exhibition deepened her long-standing engagement with art at the intersections of craft, vernacular culture, and modernism. She has published on artists such as Gertrude Morgan and Minnie Evans, and her critical essay on folk art was included in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History in 2019. Her research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Lola Sounigo
DIGITAL ARCHIVIST
Lola joins our team to support our digital archive. She holds a BA in Anthropology from Wesleyan University, where she wrote an urban anthropology thesis examining Angelenos' relationships with their cars and the freeway infrastructure of Los Angeles. After working in cultural analysis for a market research company, Lola moved to Galicia in Spain, where she researched everyday practices and usage of public space. She made an ethnographic film on a cured ham shop that serves as a site for the transmission of local folklore. She is interested in themes collective memory, heritage, infrastructure, belonging, and cultural preservation and transmission. At Berkeley, she looks forward to exploring how Folklore’s focus on informal, unofficial, popular, and alternative practices can bridge theories and methods in the humanities with urban studies practices.
AAQDSG
Services include:
Quilt Documentation
- Preservation of documents and oral histories
Quilt Documentation
- Preservation of documents and oral histories
Research Database
- Maintain a comprehensive database of African American quilts history, artists, and historical information
Artist Support
- Showcase profiles of African American quilt artists, highlighting their works and contributions
Online Events
- Host discussions of African American quilting and private gallery viewings of significant collections
Community Engagement
- Network opportunities for researchers, historians, and artists
Support for Social Causes
- Collaborate with organizations working on societal issues
Consultation
- For individuals and organizations, issues that align with the mission of preserving cultural heritage
Newsletter
