President Donald Trump’s executive order last month gutting funding for museums and other cultural institutions is being felt locally in the loss of a federal grant BAMPFA was using to help preserve its extensive collection of African American quilts, one of the downtown Berkeley museum’s most-prized treasures.
Trump’s March 14 order, targeting the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and other agencies, was part of a wave of actions against cultural organizations that he alleges have been overtaken by “woke” ideology, from the Kennedy Center to PBS.
In 2023, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive received $461,000 from IMLS’s Save America’s Treasures grant. But this month, unspent funds from that grant — about $230,000 — were revoked, just months before the opening of the museum’s new exhibit, “Routed West.” The show will feature more than 100 African American quilts from BAMPFA’s collection to tell the story of the Second Great Migration, when millions of Black people left the South in search of new opportunities and freedom in the North and West.
“It’s a very big undertaking to conserve and photograph 3,000 quilts,” said BAMPFA Executive Director Julie Rodrigues Widholm. “We feel very responsible and honored to be stewards of this collection. These are national treasures.”
The museum holds the largest collection of African American quilts in the world, which makes up approximately one fifth of its total holdings. The collection includes over 500 works by Rosie Lee Tompkins, a Richmond resident and one of the nation’s leading fabric artists. Tompkins, who died in 2006 at age 70, moved to Richmond in 1958. She worked as a nurse in convalescent homes, quilting for “peace of mind” and believing her quilting was an act of her communion with God.
It also includes quilts by Laverne Brackens, Arbie Williams and Gladys Henry, all renowned quilters who used scraps of old clothing, blankets and other fabric to create intricate designs using skills gleaned from mothers, grandmothers and other female relatives.
BAMPFA is not the only Bay Area museum impacted by the recent cuts. The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco lost at least $736,000 in federal grants from the IMLS. The funds were being used to support the museum’s Emerging Artists Program, which provides exhibition opportunities and professional development for local Black artists, and MoAD in the Classroom, an arts education initiative serving Bay Area schools.
Other projects to lose funding as a result of last month’s executive order include UC Berkeley’s Living New Deal, a crowdsourcing project that documents New Deal-era public works and a dialogue-based interpretation strategy at the Angel Island Immigration Station, the largest immigration station on the West Coast.
During Trump’s first term, he repeatedly called for the IMLS to be shut down, but funding was maintained by Congress.
On April 16, Widholm joined the leaders of nearly a dozen Bay Area museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the Asian Art Museum and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in issuing a statement condemning the move and urging IMLS to be restored.
“Museums are among the most trusted institutions in the country — integral to our cultural heritage, healthy economies, civic well-being, inspired learning, and personal enrichment,” they wrote in the statement. They “are places to connect people, to offer shared experiences and connections, to knit together our social fabric, and to preserve stories — both uplifting and calling us to our better selves. Museums are the civic institutions that we need to urgently defend…In short, museums matter.”
Many of the quilts BAMPFA is now scrambling to preserve were inherited as a result of a bequest in 2019 from the estate of Eli Leon, an Oakland psychotherapist who amassed thousands of quilts by hundreds of 20th-century quilt makers throughout his lifetime. The collection was donated to BAMPFA, which since then has staged several shows featuring the quilts, including a 2020 Tompkins retrospective.
“It’s an extraordinary collection going back to the 1860s and reflects the artistic expression and creativity of hundreds of African American women,” said Widholm. “For us, it’s a really important part of American history.”
The very ordinariness of quilts is what makes the collection so special, said Elaine Yau, associate curator and academic liaison at BAMPFA. “The fact that quilts are everywhere but not in [many] museums is the crux of the issue,” Yau said. “Quilts are the everyday creations of women and the testaments of women’s lives. BAMPFA’s collection represents the work of [Black] women, who are historically marginalized, especially in the art world.”
Conserving quilts is a laborious and time-intensive process. Since they are used in people’s day to day lives, they are exposed to dirt, sweat, mold and insects and other substances that can degrade their quality.
Once they become part of a museum’s collection, they first undergo an oxygen deprivation treatment that flushes out mold spores, carpet beetles and moths. An antiseptic surface cleaner is then applied before the quilts are wrapped in acid free tissue and stored in acid free boxes, a process that takes at least six months.
Now that funding has been lost, the painstaking work of preserving and cataloging the quilts risks being delayed by years, unless alternate sources of funding can be found, Widholm said. UC Berkeley has agreed to fund the quilt conservation through December, after which the museum will lean on other sources of funding to protect the collection.
“There’s definitely a mood of uncertainty but also resolve to continue our work,” Widholm said.
Featured image (clockwise from top left): Pillow (see above); Untitled (Double Wedding Ring) by Emma Hall; Jewelry Christmas Tree bottle by Rosie Lee Tompkins; Untitled by Susan Pless; Mary Bright Commemorative Quilt by Alice Neal; Untitled (necktie quilt) by Gerstine Scott. Eli Leon bequest. Photos: Kevin Candland and BAMPFA
could
you please put a link for
donations to this project
Hi Pamela, I’m not aware of a fundraiser specifically for this exhibit, but you can support the museum itself. Here’s a link: https://bampfa.org/support