Rosie Lee Tompkins: Renowned Quilt Maker
- Sheri Storie
- 3 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Effie Mae Martin known professionally as Rosie Lee Tompkins was a renowned African American quilt maker who changed the face of contemporary art.
Effie Mae Martin/Rosie Lee Tompkins
Effie Mae Martin was born on September 6, 1936, in Gould, Arkansas, to sharecroppers Sadie Bell and MacCurey Martin. The eldest of 15 siblings, Martin helped her parents to pick cotton in her youth. She also helped her mother to piece together quilts using every scrap of clothing available to them. Martin never finished high school.
In 1958, she moved to Richmond, California, where she took nursing classes and eventually worked as a practical nurse in convalescent homes. Martin loved and excelled at her job as she was naturally outgoing and personable. At some point, she married, and her last name became Howard. She would marry and divorce twice in her lifetime, raising five children and stepchildren. During this period of her life, she produced no quilts.
By the late 1970s, Martin began experiencing paranoia and quilting brought her peace of mind. For Martin, her quilts were a means of communion with God and a form of prayer. She only showed these quilts to family members.
During the mid-1980s, quilt collector and aficionado Eli Leon saw one of Martin’s quilts at a flea market and tracked her down. Leon convinced Martin to let him see her work, beginning their friendship and professional relationship. Leon got Martin’s work displayed at museums and galleries, but the extremely private Martin refused to be interviewed, photographed, or even recorded. She instead asked to be exhibited under the pseudonym Rosie Lee Tompkins. In 1988, her first exhibit, “Who’d a Thought It?” appeared at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art. The exhibit was then displayed at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian and the American Craft Museum in New York City, as well as at 26 other venues. Her work was also featured in magazines and exhibited in university galleries and well-known museums.
Martin was deeply religious, believing she was an instrument of God as He designed her patchworks. Astonished at her work, she even once exclaimed, “I wonder how I did that! It was the Lord that helped me.” As she aged, she continued to find comfort in her unique blend of prayer and needlework, embroidering Bible verses into her work. She also made quilts to honor family members. Her Three Sixes quilt, which contained approximately six variable-sized rectangles per strip, honored three of her relatives whose birth dates include the number six.
According to a University of Virginia resource on Southern quilting, African American quilts are characterized by: large shapes and bold colors, weaving, improvisation, asymmetry, recordkeeping, applique, and religious symbols. She employed a wide variety of traditional patterns, including half-squares, medallions, and yo-yos, exploring and adapting these methods to her taste while integrating unusual materials. Her use of embroidery and printed images on recycled clothes suggests her commentary on contemporary social, political, and cultural events. Martin’s quilts were regarded as radical in their use of untraditional materials like feed sacks, rayon, velvet, polyester, fake fur, wool, and silk instead of cotton. Because of their vivid colors, geometric shapes, and patterns, critics have compared her work to modernist paintings.
Her quilts have been added to permanent collections of many museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and the Oakland Museum of California, influencing droves of quilters.
Throughout her professional career, Martin was an anonymous artist. Since only four people in the art world knew what she looked like, she was able to visit her own exhibits without anyone’s knowledge. She rarely sold her quilts and never attended out-of-town exhibitions of her quilts.
On December 1, 2006, Martin was found dead at her home in Richmond, California. She was 70 years old. She is buried in Arkansas. She is survived by her family, including her children and numerous grandchildren. In 2020, her work was the subject of an exhibition of her work entitled Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum, which received coverage in the New York Times. Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective featured approximately 3,000 quilts by African American artists donated from the estate of the collector Eli Leon.
Jefferson County Quilt Trail
Image Credit: arkansasquilttrails.com
Just as the Berkley Art Museum makes a habit of exhibiting and celebrating, Arkansas is among the states with a quilt trail. Quilt trails are known for displaying barn quilts painted on wood or metal on freestanding quilts along a chosen route to emphasize the architectural and aesthetic landscape of the area. The Jefferson County Quilt Trail, located in the Arkansas Delta, does just that. The trail was developed, and many of the quilts were painted by volunteer Sharon Price.The trail runs through Pine Bluff, White Hall, and Redfield.
Sources:
https://arkansasquilttrails.com - Enter Trail #11, The Jefferson County Quilt Trail—-Sponsored By Relyance Bank
Written by: Ninfa O. Barnard