I am taken aback by the meditative quiet in the daytime at the Compound, the warehouse art center known for its nightlife. Crossing through a sun-dappled garden, the shared kitchen, and a rather graphic photo installation in the atrium gallery, I finally arrive at the studio of Stephen Towns.
Examining fear and refusing its demand to shrink, Towns is an artist whose work illustrates the multiple dimensions of courage. Born outside of Charleston, South Carolina, bravery is his subject and his method, a lesson and theme in his life which he says he relearns constantly as a Black gay man married to his partner of 17 years.
“There was never a sort of graceful coming out where I felt embraced. [But] you’re always coming out, you’re coming out when you go to a hotel and you say, no, just one room, just one king bed or whatever,” he tells me.
As our conversation begins to explore the relationship between his sexuality and art practice, Towns describes a discomfort with the way LGBTQ+ Pride Month is celebrated. To him, freedom for Black queer lovers is an unfinished project, one historically helmed by working-class trans women of color like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Riviera. Though the history of queer liberation movements is marked by courage and a willingness to engage in struggle, Pride celebrations are sometimes flattened into a social movement “win” for LGBTQ+ communities. Ongoing battles for queer people’s safety and human rights often lose attention in the sea of celebration, isolating those whose lives continue to be threatened by the intersections of patriarchal violence, racism, and overpolicing.
For Towns, the drive to push through continued struggle comes from knowing and representing history as an artist. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out when I make each of these works or learn about a story, is just how to push through the challenges that come,” he says.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out when I make each of these works or learn about a story, is just how to push through the challenges that come,” he says.
Like many of his other admirers, I fell into the fold of his quilts first. Part of his Rockwell Museum show that year, “I Will Follow You My Dear” (2024) is an underwater mirage of two Black women hand in hand, their bathing suits dating their escapade somewhere in the late 1940s. The scene was magical to me, arresting. The romance of hiding out beneath the surface, the tension of the cresting waves overhead both erotic and darkly suspenseful. The swatches of arm and leg that make up each figure hold to the perspective line to give the ocean extending in all directions a distinct and sedimentary depth. The two swim amongst coral reefs and schools of fish, a reminder of the mermaids that walk among us and the fossils beneath our feet. A reminder that we have history. That the water is our kin. That being seen is sometimes the danger, and sometimes the medicine.
In a growing collection of mixed media, quilted, and paint-based works, Towns’ view of history offers an open door to explore emotional contradictions embedded in the material and economic ones shaping our world. Fear and love are commonly his thesis and antithesis, realities combined and thus transformed into a unique hybrid of both. What truth arrives when two opposing forces compound? What stands at the fault line between repression and resistance, scarcity and abundance, violence and compassion, nature and industry? The work asks and answers. By Towns’ hand Black figures dazzle, frozen in stolen moments of ecstasy, resilience, and freedom, at once softening the viewer’s gaze and straightening our spines. Self-taught, Towns approaches quilting as a sculptural expansion of his painting practice, using fabric and thread to build texture, complexity, and iridescence.
By Towns’ hand Black figures dazzle, frozen in stolen moments of ecstasy, resilience, and freedom, at once softening the viewers gaze and straightening our spines.
Watching him unfurl pieces from the inventory of quilts is mesmerizing. Each shimmers and dances with light. Beading enlivens the rain, the fruit in the bushes, the stars in the sky. A 2021 quilt titled “Mary McLeod Bethune” honors the prolific educator and activist, who shares Towns’ South Carolinian roots. Its lines of straight stitches comply in single file, anchoring appliqued patterns more convoluted than one mind alone could calculate. The quilt is a mirror of its reference image, a photo taken in 1905 of Bethune and almost forty girls enrolled in the schoolhouse she had founded the year prior with “$1.50, faith in God and five little girls.” Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls would exponentially grow under the Florida sun, building into what is known today as Bethune-Cookman University.
Each of Towns’ quilts is a document diligently copying down recipes for the slick sweat on the brow of the wretched of the earth — the way we make a way out of no way, the technologies produced in our survival. He gets it from his mama, so to speak. Patricia Towns was a seamstress, inspiring her son to give attention to detail and craft in his own work. “I remember going back in her room and sitting around listening to the humming of her machine or watching her lay out and pin thin layers of patterned paper over fabric,” Towns says. “I am not sure if I appreciated the amount of work she was doing at the time; however, as an adult, I marvel at the amount of engineering and patience it took for her to make garments.” Towns’ mathematical precision is enough to evoke a hum of respect from most quilters, although the unfinished backs of his quilts might make a few grandmothers chuckle. This is an artist primarily concerned with the quilt as image rather than as object, focusing on the face normally displayed in museums and galleries.
If fear is a question, courage is Towns’ answer, and love is the reason. The painter and fiber artist divulges that he developed his art practice as he grappled with his relationship to religious shame, learning to reject it as he discovered his own sexuality.
Towns’ early paintings challenged the idea of humans as sinners, a religious doctrine that led to confusion and fear in his youth. College course work during a Bachelor of Fine Art in Studio Art at the University of South Carolina exposed Towns to Catholic iconography through the eyes of Dutch Golden Age and Renaissance master painters. Artists like Vermeer, Michaelangelo, and others inspired by Byzantine Empire church mosaics incorporated gilding techniques that many today attribute to North Africa in their works to add illumination and symbolize the eternal light of God. Towns responded to the grand mosaics of this period depicting the Bible’s holy figures, employing his own figurative painting in defense of the inherent holiness of Black bodies. The body of work coming from this time features gilded figures surrounded by a halo of gold leaf. The creative decision emerged alongside his clarity about the ways the religion he grew up with did not fit into what he was learning about himself as a gay man. “For me, I needed to see Black people as saints,” he says. “It’s hard to tell a Black person that they’re this bad evil person when they have this gold shimmering halo behind them, or they have these beautiful reflective objects behind them.”
Undoing what he had been taught about shame, Towns found himself embraced by Black gay community in Columbia, South Carolina. “The CDC and drug companies were funding [HIV prevention programs] so that Black gay men could come together to have conversations because of the number of transmissions at that time period. So, we would go to those. I would volunteer for things like passing out condoms at clubs, doing workshops on HIV prevention, and then volunteering where you go out and you talk to people about it. Because I was in college, I was away from home, I was able to do all of those things to develop a community and to educate myself about safer sex practices and sort of create a community around that.”
Towns describes that time as a Black love movement, set to a soundtrack of then-emerging artists Erykah Badu and Jill Scott and alive with the bubbling energy of the newly-minted internet spaces like AOL chatrooms and BlackPlanet. In his story I can almost smell the patchouli incense floating over the quad; I can just barely see the beautiful Black brothers retwisting each other’s locs and reading from Elon Harris’ books out loud between bouts of poetry. In my mind, the image looks like a Stephen Towns artwork.
Sitting in his East Baltimore studio, it’s unmistakable that Black South Carolinian artists are part of the foundation of Towns’ visual language, for which he credits his high school art teacher, Damond Howard. A 2016 mixed-media series headed to Morgan State University this fall titled “Sunken” is mounted on one of the two gallery walls, combining paint, fabric, and beads in remembrance of the lives lost during the 1781 Zong massacre, in which 133 enslaved Africans were thrown into the ocean by the ship’s crew as they sailed to Jamaica. Holding the viewer’s eye contact with the imagined faces of the victims, Towns paints a series of somber gazes floating in a visceral navy sky, echoing the mood and figurative compositions of Tom Feelings’ mournful black and white 1995 Middle Passage paintings.
These are what Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe might call “wake work,” calling attention to the remnants of slavery present in our lives today. Towns’ first quilt, “Birth of a Nation” (2014), visualizes the false promises of America by exploring what critics have dubbed the “flag issue,” a topic which held celebrated batik painter Leo Twiggs’ attention for forty years of his career. The ongoing confrontation with the emblem of the American flag is at the heart of Southern discourses surrounding legacy and future, writes artist and professor Michael Marks. The suite of styles flown over the last 300 years include the American colonial flag, the blue and white Confederate, and fifty-star United States — each reflecting a shifting vision for the nation that they pledge allegiance to.
“Birth of a Nation” quilts a 13-star red and white striped flag, appliqued with the silhouette of a nursing Black woman cradling a white baby to her breast. This monumental piece born between the widely protested extrajudicial murders of Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray was the beginning of Towns’ investigation of which violences are considered justified and patriotic and which are considered unlawful. It was this quilt that transfixed Christopher Bedford, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art at the time, Towns tells me. After seeing it in a studio visit, Bedford included the quilt in the 2018 show “Ruminations and Reckoning,” Towns’ first solo exhibition at the museum.
When I ask about his current creative challenges, Towns sighs deeply.
“The government,” he answers.
For an artist as concerned with public memory as he is with Black portraiture, the threat of censorship is not theoretical. Funding cuts have affected his access to grants and teaching opportunities. “A lot of the stuff that I do is now considered illegal,” he says. Towns’ work incites controversial conversations about racism, slavery, and reparations. Slavery demands acknowledgement, Towns insists, citing wage slavery and capitalist work culture as extensions of the same human rights violation. “Until we acknowledge the system, until we have reparations for that system, it’s going to continue to happen, and it’s not only going to affect Black people, it’s going to affect everybody. And it is affecting everybody.” His motif of Black families, children, and lovers at rest seem to spit in the eye of a culture that worships labor and whiteness.
For an artist as concerned with public memory as he is with Black portraiture, the threat of censorship is not theoretical.
Portraits of personal friends and historic Civil War figures breathe life into the white cube studio space. Oversized birch wood panels slouch against the wall, waiting for his attention. Despite waning opportunities to show work that centers and uplifts erased histories, Towns has worked hard to get where he is, supported by the rich black soil of Baltimore City’s creative community.
Towns arrived in the mid-Atlantic in 2009 after being laid off from his job at a South Carolina medical university, bouncing around between different gigs in public health, education, retail, and fitness, and couch surfing with family and friends. After finally securing a job in the office of Community Engagement at Maryland Institute College of the Arts, Towns was able to get his footing in his career.
Later that year, Towns had his first date with his now-husband and studio manager, Jermaine Táron Bell. The young couple walked around Calvert Street and ended up talking about art over lunch at Papermoon Diner. Towns moved to City Arts, an affordable housing development for artists in the Station North Arts District. There, the lower cost of living helped Towns save money to invest into his painting, and Bell began working with other friends and neighbors at City Arts to support Towns’ art practice. With a team he could rely on, Towns’ ascension was slow and steady. He recalls his first group show at Station North Arts Cafe, a venue helmed by the vivacious Baltimore figure Kevin Brown and Bill Maughin, Brown’s husband, who passed away in 2023.
The same year that Towns’ first solo show opened at the BMA, he and Bell returned to the site of their first date to tie the knot at a courthouse on North Calvert street. Finding success in both love and in art is a testament to Towns’ skill, work ethic and luck.
Black male quilters like Towns are few and far between, but their role in preserving African American quilting traditions has always been vital to the culture. Prior to the transatlantic slave trade, men were stewards of their indigenous African textile traditions, weaving kente (Ghana), aso oke (Nigeria) and mudcloth (Mali). These men were the predominant artisans making story-based wall hangings across various civilizations in West and Central Africa — including the Mande, Yoruba, Fon, Ejagham, and Kongo peoples. Holding fast to this foundation while practicing European patchwork quilting, African fiber artistry influenced African American quilters’ use of applique, improvisation, color, and rhythm for centuries to come. As Western norms relegated sewing to a domestic and therefore a women’s craft, fewer men were comfortable being seen carrying these practices. Men would relegate authorship of their quilts to their wives, or quilt privately and out of eyesight. As quilting, and particularly African American quilts, rose in the fine arts field in the late 1990s, Black male quilters across history were recognized and celebrated, albeit sparingly.
While it is rare to find a Black male quilter, Towns assures me he is in good company. He cites renowned contemporary artists like Michael A. Cummings and Ramsess as peers he admires, fiber artists devoted to interpreting history and reclaiming their heritage and tradition within African American textile practices.
Soon, Towns will be reunited with a collection of quilts he made for a solo show at the Wichita Art Museum in Kansas in 2025, “Safer Waters: Picturing Black Recreation at Midcentury.”
With the show coming down later this month, Towns says the feeling is bittersweet. The quilts were made for people to experience and learn about Paradise Park and other sites of Black beachside recreation. They were made to spread knowledge and ignite conversations. They were made to be in the world.
In a few weeks they will return home to sit atop the layers and layers of quilts Towns has made since 2014. Whether he employs needle or brush, Towns’ hands sanctify Black life. Each artwork translates the mundane and the heroic with equal reverence, composing new visual narratives for an upcoming body of work about Black Western migration.