Of Salt and Spirit

Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South surveys some of the richly diverse quiltmaking traditions maintained by Black women in the US South during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawn from the Mississippi Museum of Art’s holdings, the works featured in this publication highlight a major 2022 gift of quilts collected by renowned Black folklife documentarian Roland L. Freeman. Over sixty handmade quilts, quilters’ portraits, and related objects together emphasize the importance of Mississippi and the broader South as foundational sites of knowledge production and artistic development.

In earlier studies of African American quilters, Freeman observed that popular interest in quilts had resulted in “insufficient attention to who these quilters were, what quilting meant in their lives and what it represented within their community.” While quilt revivals in the 1970s and “80s generated renewed interest in how geography and autobiography inform quiltmaking, there has been minimal consideration of the nuanced roles that race, gender, and class play in shaping the public’s understanding of quilting traditions and techniques. Prevailing scholarship continues to frame Black southern quiltmaking as an exclusively improvisational artform. Of Salt and Spirit intervenes in this narrative by foregrounding the complex relational and archival practices of Black women quilters who cultivate networks of mutual support and preserve personal histories around and through their craft.

The book features ninety-five color illustrations; essays by exhibition curator Sharbreon Plummer, Lauren Cross (Gail-Oxford Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens), and Danielle Mason (folklorist); as well as a roundtable discussion among contemporary quilters facilitated by Lydia Jasper, assistant curator of the Permanent Collection, Mississippi Museum of Art.