Fiber art hasn’t been the same since the COVID-19 pandemic. What was once only seen as a provincial pastime has expanded into a fine art laden with urgency and voice. Quilts, and the people who make them, seem hungry to preserve something sacred and majestic. Even my own grandmother, who after quilting for the last 30 years still swears she is not an artist, can no longer deny the craft’s elevated status.
The art quilts emerging from the ashes of 2020 are not without precedent. Quilting has spent the last three decades migrating from home decor into contemporary art galleries across the country. The tradition itself is ancient, but the last time cotton was king in Charm City was at the climax of American slavery. The owners of Maryland’s textile mills, fed by cotton and slave labor coming from the South, were growing wealthy in the young nation.
Where we sit today is the echo of this past — a time when the constant churn of overseas slave labor floods local marketplaces with fabric and fast fashion. A time when our personal inheritances swell with clothing in the aftermath of mass death, the residue of grief piled in our closets like off-season hoodies.
In both cases, the art is a response, but Baltimore’s current quilters are less interested in conformity than their pre-Civil War predecessors. In today’s dystopia, textile artists prompt us to consider craft as a way of challenging disposability culture — the increasingly normal act of throwing inconvenient things and people away. Constructing new meaning from discarded fabric, these makers play a vital role in disrupting what philosopher Karl Marx calls the alienation of a capitalist system. There is a refusal to detach from labor, from each other, and from the self. Artists humbly mend the frayed fabric of our culture, and they may very well be the last defense against the rising tide of AI and a throw-away world. Their handiwork asks us to touch, hold on to, and remember the pieces we leave behind for one another.
Even the mayor’s office seems to be indulging. With a revival of Baltimore’s 1981 quilt competition, Mayor Brandon Scott stitched renewed interest in fiber arts into the city budget.
The competition culminated earlier this summer with Baltimore city officials awarding a $5,000 grand prize to local quilt collective Piecing with a Purpose in honor of their 18-block quilt, “Baltimore Citizens, from Past to Present.” The resulting exhibit of finalists in the competition, “Homage to Baltimore,” was on display at Current Space through July 19. On its closing night, Denise Bailey-Jones’ “Baltimore Arabbers: Makin’ It Around the Town” was selected for the audience choice award, a nod to the living tradition of selling fruit from horse-drawn carriages in the city. Arabbers’ ethos of hard work is reverently captured in Bailey-Jones’ denim portrait.
Arriving at the gallery in June to find a bustling opening reception, I was pleasantly surprised that two winners from 1981 showed their work along with the finalists. The 1981 grand prize winner, made by a group of six quilters from Pasadena, Maryland, is a black and gold hand-stitched rendering of Baltimore’s marble steps. The demure architectural motif is a staple of neighborhoods like Auchentoroly Terrace, Charles North, and Patterson Park. The other, coming in second place, used a sewing machine to paint the landscape of transit in Baltimore. This quilt by Arlington, Virginia, artist Merry Bean was ahead of its time, the only in its year to deviate from hand stitching, piecework, and appliqué techniques in favor of the machine.
The two relics of the past are a benchmark against which to judge the 2026 finalists, illuminating the shift in popular quilting styles over the last several decades — today’s quilts are more pictorial, more narrative, and more machine-based than those made in 1981. This difference suggests that, as quilts moved from merely decorative bed coverings and into the realm of fine art in the late 1980s and 1990s, aesthetic sensibilities widened in the direction of artful quilts that eschewed the rigid rules of seam allowance and laborious hand stitching. The 24 works in the exhibit visualize how fiber artists are interpreting Baltimore today, 45 years later.
I perused the full catalog of quilts listed in a packet stacked by the gallery entrance, along with a zine documenting the lore of Baltimore’s first quilting contest. While I enjoyed the reading, I wondered if these dense packets of information are easy to digest for everyone. There are many obstacles, I think, between a curator and their responsibility to honor the artist. Lack of resources, bureaucracy, politics, literacy. Some more forgivable than others. But with no visual descriptions, titles, or artists names on the walls next to the quilts, “Homage to Baltimore” audiences were left somewhat unguided about how to view the work, and the artists’ intentions and craftsmanship got lost at times in a directionless haze.
The grand prize-winning quilt, “Baltimore Citizens, from Past to Present, on a Zoom Call” is a hand- and machine-stitched piece unravelling the fabric of time and reconstructing it into an anachronous screenshot. The quilt offers the scene of a virtual meeting of Baltimore residents, intending to highlight significant figures that tend to recede from public memory. Each block is as playful and effervescent as the last, sharing a handful of fabrics in common but otherwise completely distinct. Portraits of Henrietta Lacks by Peggy D’Adamo, Jada Pinkett Smith by Jane Khattak, Elizabeth Talford Scott by Lowery Stokes Sims, Mary Elizabeth Lange by Denise Bailey-Jones, and more join in conversation on the collaborative quilt face. Many names are familiar to me and important specifically to Baltimore’s art history, and I was refreshed to see them represented in the show. Piecing with Purpose organizer and ceramics teacher Sarah Barnes told me the concept emerged during the collective’s regular meeting, a mirror of the ways they are finding connection and community in a digital time.
“We meet on Zoom once a month, and we were trying to figure out our next quilt, thinking up Baltimore people who don’t get recognized as much,” she said. “We wondered, what if they were together doing what we are?”
In addition to a somewhat literal interpretation of the competition theme, the quilt boasts elaborate handiwork. When the crowd cleared, I could stand close enough to see the tufts of corded upholstery, embroidered names, photographs, and beads embellishing the scene. On its back is a minimal and abstracted pattern boldly rendering the early television color bar test screen. Between the retro TV on its back and the Baltimore history storyboarded onto its face, the air is seasoned nostalgic by “Baltimore Citizens,” a sentimentality that celebrates the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual innovations born in Charm City.
In the bottom corner, it is signed with the names of its 18 makers, a small number of the collective’s nearly 70 members. Barnes, whose block honors the poet Adrienne Rich, has been quilting for over 35 years and says she has seen interest in Baltimore’s textile arts spike following the COVID-19 pandemic. Barnes has been leading the Piecing with a Purpose collective virtually since then, as a continuation of the MICA quilt raffle founded in the 2010s by professor Susie Brant in partnership with the African American Quilters of Baltimore. Following the tradition of its predecessors, Piecing with Purpose intends to donate most of the proceeds to a local social justice organization. In the past, the collective has used quilt earnings to fundraise for local arts education, mutual aid, immigrant and refugee rights, free food and shelter for the unhoused, and Baltimore public school youth.
Piecing with a Purpose’s award-winning quilt is a contemporary remix of a global staple in quilting with origins here in Charm City: the Baltimore Album Quilt. The Album Quilt is a common motif in the gallery, woven into details, borders, and forming the foundation of several group quilts in the show.
According to the International Quilt Museum, a group of over 400 quilts made near Baltimore, Maryland, from around 1842 through 1858 are what are known today as Baltimore Album Quilts. Their style is distinguished from others in their time period by the use of imported hand-painted fabric called chintzes and newly accessible 100% cotton fabric produced by local textile mills. These quilts are a stark contrast to popular styles of the time, which largely used recycled scraps and patchwork patterns. Album Quilts featured appliquéd blocks designed by different makers, with floral patterns and borders often embellished with ribbon, embroidery, or ink.
Like the 2026 “Baltimore Citizens” quilt, pre-Civil War Album Quilt squares were donated by different quilters and then sewn together into one communal and decorative piece. Often, quilters would sign their contributed block, adding to the feel of the quilt as a scrapbook album. As the Civil War prompted changes in Baltimore’s access to cotton and therefore production of fine fabrics, textile production declined in the city and Album Quilts faded in relevance. The trend resurfaced with an international revival in 1983 following the research and publication of Elly Sienkiewicz. Her book about Baltimore Album Quilts, “Spoken Without a Word,” featured patterns and historical details that prompted quilters globally to take up the practice of making Baltimore Album Quilts. These quilts are a case study in how local arts movements in Baltimore can and do impact global culture, and perhaps also how long artists may have to wait for their legacy to be recognized. In the case of the Baltimore Album Quilt makers, that timeline was over 120 years.
While the globalization of Baltimore is a source of pride, preservation of homegrown culture is a constant battle for Baltimoreans — these vital stories remain precarious in public memory, liable to fade even as their impact ripples beyond the source.
While the globalization of Baltimore is a source of pride, preservation of homegrown culture is a constant battle for Baltimoreans — these vital stories remain precarious in public memory, liable to fade even as their impact ripples beyond the source.
There was no wall spared an Album Quilt in the Current Space show. One such piece, “Baltimore, the City That Quilts,” was made by 17 community members, sharing the obvious (or classic) composition: a patchwork of blocks that depict places in the city most meaningful to contributors. Creators donated their blocks to Baltimore Heritage, a group preserving stories of the city through research and minidocumentaries released on YouTube. Their five-minute history on the Baltimore Album Quilt is an oft-cited source amongst quilters, so seeing them in the show felt as natural as seeing the Ravens and Orioles logos around the gallery. Howard Street Bridge, Arabbers, the Preakness, and Tola’s Room stood out in the group quilt, in unspoken agreement with solo quilts on the opposite wall — such as Bailey-Jones’ “Baltimore Arabbers” — about the weight these figures hold in Baltimore’s culture. Another team quilt made by eighth grade students at Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women includes the RLong tag, AFRAM Festival, a dirt bike rider, Baltimore’s sports teams, a Freddie Gray protest, and an image of the Baltimore voguing scene by photographer and archivist SHAN Wallace in their roundup of scenery.
The show’s nostalgic atmosphere was pierced by one piece — “Highway to Nowhere,” a quilt bearing the reminder of the 2,800 people displaced by the infamous Interstate 70 project of the 1970s. Although partially abstract, public memory relies on material, tangible residue of past events. The remains of the thriving Black communities once calling this West Baltimore corridor home live on in the archive, but all that is left in their place is a sunken and incomplete highway scarring the landscape of the city. In a quilt resurrecting some of the 971 homes demolished for the highway behind a blockade of sheer fabric reading “highway to nowhere,” quilter Kimberly Tucker made us all witness to the ghosts and hard truths of Baltimore’s past, refusing it a pedestal.
Other subtly entrancing quilts like “Back Window View” by Janice Adams-DeVance made me double take. Overlooking a grid of Baltimore rowhouses in a shadowy geometric nightscape, each home sits snug against the next, separated sparingly by a dark sliver of alleyway. Quilts like these rearrange time and space like you picked up the dice in a game of Jumanji. As I looked into the stacked rows of city blocks, R&B darling Stephanie Mills sang falsetto in my head. Sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett also came to mind, as she always does when I am caught up in the rapture of an image. Catlett’s 1946 print “…special houses…” was reprinted in 1989, the same year Mills released her 12th studio album: “Home.” A fantasy of love overflowing against a history of segregation and loss. Adams-DeVance walks into the jungle of Black art history with her own interpretation of home, joining this conversation, one that has spanned generations to ask, “How do we get back there? Do you know how to fly?” Adams-DeVance’s “Back Window View” suggests a bird’s-eye perspective, not unlike the fiber artist, educator, and activist Faith Ringgold in her resonant 1991 children’s story quilt “Tar Beach.”
Raised in the orbit of such giants in textile art and Black urban image-making, certain compositions stir deep memories of languages I learned before I could speak. Adams-DeVance recalls those Black vernaculars of escape, of freedom, and of urban wonder. Her “Back Window View” gazes at a Baltimore magical and liberated, a landing place for the People Who Fly. A deeper look grants you more intimacy, noticing the inclusion of Ankara fabric amongst the tightly packed neighborhoods like a secret beauty mark. The unmistakable West African wax freckled amidst cotton commemorates the transatlantic trade routes that define Baltimore’s history and culture.
Colorful Ankara fabric was an element of the grand prize-winning quilt and a number of others: “Baltimore by Neighborhood” by Cheryl Hills, “Baltimore Map” by Marnee Keith, and “All My Dreams Started in East Baltimore” by Kianga Jinaki. Throughout the show, the presence of the fabric told a story of a local textile history that bridges Africa, Europe, and Maryland. An Ankara print with the colors of the Maryland and Baltimore flags frames a portrait of the 1400 block of Broadway, where Jinaki remembers growing up in the late 1960s and 1970s. Her use of traditional West African textiles — indigo-dyed fabric, batik, and Ankara — work with cotton and recycled denim to build a diasporic texture into her work. Jinaki makes her neighborhood in East Baltimore a crossroads where she is native to many lands, relating to them through embellishment, photo transfer, embroidery, and appliqué.
The finalists and winners of “Homage to Baltimore” were chosen by a small jury — 1981 finalist Mimi Dietrich, AAQB member and Morgan State Professor of Social Work Christa C. Gilliam, and MICA professor Monique Crabb — but during the closing reception, the people decided their champion. The Viewer’s Choice Award was a chance to reflect which stories Baltimore’s citizens connected with most. A moment that invites us back into a right relationship with our neighbors and with the resurging significance of craft. “Homage to Baltimore” is calling us to recognize something real and human in the sea of scraps we swim through daily.