When Denise Bailey-Jones tells the story of growing up on Whitelock Street in the 1970s and 1980s, she talks about the basketball games. The intoxicating air of competition filling the summer nights, the athleticism. Street ball was not just casual sport — the neighborhood youth league had devout fans, she tells me. Coach Tyrone Gaines and Lionel “Kool Aid” Pauling saved and changed lives in a neighborhood where violence was sometimes fatal and elders of the community fought for safe spaces for play. Court lights shimmered on skin slick with sweat and relentless drive. Black boys alive and at play, a village spectating their excellence and cheering for their wins. These mesmerizing games imprinted a sense of hyperlocal pride on Bailey-Jones.
Measuring the weight of this moment years later, she would stitch the memory back to life through three layers of fabric, holding it cradled in her lap. A quilt, its face streaked oaky brown, evokes the familiar grains of a basketball court. Several appliqués, orange basketballs, bounce along the sidelines. She proudly shows me a photo, telling me that the popular narrative of Whitelock’s history often leaves the joy out.
Bailey-Jones began quilting over ten years ago as she completed her PhD in organizational psychology. Looking for an outlet to ease her mind from her studies, she was inspired by the art practice as a method of preserving family history. Still rooted in community, her work revolves around memorial quilts made as a means of honoring life, death, weddings, and other significant transitions. The process of recycling scrap fabric from clothing, furniture, and other used textiles is part of what binds memory work to this art medium, with artists stitching each quilt into a repository of artifacts with a story to tell. These quilts are born with a purpose.
The process of recycling scrap fabric from clothing, furniture, and other used textiles is part of what binds memory work to this art medium, with artists stitching each quilt into a repository of artifacts with a story to tell.
“In traditional quilting, you have to make sure everything is a quarter inch.… But the art quilts? It’s about the story,” Bailey-Jones said. “I use people’s clothes. For people who passed, I’ll ask family members, ‘Can I have a pair of pants or a shirt?’ and incorporate those in the quilt.”
I met Bailey-Jones when she was barefoot in a carpeted student lounge at Coppin State University, stepping gingerly over her latest work in progress — a collaborative t-shirt quilt celebrating women’s athletics at the university. Her hands skip over patches of worn cotton, donated shirts soft from being loved on, to flatten them along the seams, anchoring them to complimentary fabrics selected for their colorful cohesion with the other blues and golds uplifting the school’s spirit.
For weeks she and other members of the African American Quilters of Baltimore, a passionate guild of stitchers working in the belly of Baltimore’s illustrious fiber art ecosystem, have partnered with the Westside Open Works Quilt Club to turn the donated t-shirts into a stunning six-foot-long quilt. Pamela Pitt, the AAQB member who came up with the idea for the group quilt, says that despite being an alumni of Johns Hopkins, it’s her way of fortifying HBCU students against the economic fallout threatened by the current federal administration. While President Donald Trump pledged $500 million to support these colleges and universities in 2025, policy experts note that his administration’s economic agenda disproportionately harms low- and middle-income Black students, limiting HBCUs ability to deliver on their mission.
“They’re trying to wipe us out,” Pitt scoffs. “But I won’t let ‘em.”
Bailey-Jones works with Westside Open Works fiber artist-in-residence Audrey Lee Naiva to plan where the appliqués will go. Naiva, who first started collaborating with AAQB as a student in Maryland Institute College of Art’s quilt group, explains how she machine printed silhouettes traced from campus sports photography to create the black fabric cut outs of women in motion, striking, driving, bounding forward. A larger figure dances in the frame of the quilt’s center block, bordered by a Ghanaian-style cloth resembling kente. The figure wears a patchwork dress stitched with a block cut from the heart of a graphic tee. It reads in bold: “Everyone Watches Women’s Sports.” Bailey-Jones tells me she pieced the dress together herself using yards of a fabric she created by combining scrap pieces together.
When completed, the quilt will be raffled off at Coppins Homecoming Jazz Brunch on February 22, with proceeds going to support the women’s athletics program.
Baltimore’s role as a quilt city is no secret, famously remembered for the Baltimore Album Quilt. This distinctive style emerged in the 1840s as communities of women in Baltimore collaborated, piecing together blocks of floral fabrics and using appliqué to add layered designs into the celebratory quilts. Often, each block bore the signature of its unique maker. The style spread from Baltimore across the world. Though the Album Quilt trend receded along with the availability of cotton in the port city following the Civil War, the culture of co-operative work has remained an inextricable part of Baltimore’s DNA.
Internationally renowned artists like Bisa Butler, Sanford Biggers, and Joyce J. Scott have gathered in Baltimore in recent years for rigorous intellectual conversations surrounding fiber art aesthetics in the Black expressive traditions. These conversations emerged in 2024 as part of “No Stone Left Unturned: The Elizabeth Talford Scott Initiative,” a remarkable program that honored the artist’s fiber art and quilts with eight exhibitions across Baltimore museums and colleges. The fervor was palpable around the series of shows, demonstrating a deep local connection to these artworks and the artists making them. Accompanying workshops and exhibits offered joyous celebrations throughout the year, bringing together community members and contemporary quilt makers working in Scott’s legacy. And the spotlight on fiber art in Charm City continues to shine in 2026, with Mayor Brandon Scott’s first ever quilt competition coming in April and offering a $5,000 prize to its winner.
The mantra of the AAQB is “each one, teach one.” Sitting in during a couple of Open Works quilt club sessions, I see guild members generously instruct about adhesion: that there are many ways to hold fabric, and communities, together; that each layer on a quilt tells a story of utility and beauty, offering a reverence for comfort and care that delights my deepest Venusian sensibilities. They put me to work, and we neatly apply heat-activated glue to the cut-out silhouettes and finalize their placement on the quilt face.
Pitt tells me how she got started with her first sewing machine when she was in middle school, growing up in Harford County. Now her collection of fabrics ignites her quilting process, inspiring her to consider color as a way to express style and texture. Bernadette Burley, an AAQB member coming from a lineage of Southern quilters, bubbles with enthusiasm, describing her quilts as a conversation with the media she watches on television and Youtube, be it football, cartoons, or instructional videos.
When the night ends, the appliquéd figures are ready to iron on, bringing the quilt one step closer to being laid over batting and backing layers and then stitched to perfection with a long arm machine. Bailey-Jones and Pitt roll the piece up for now.
Next stop for this magnificent quilt? The monthly guild meeting show-and-tell the following week.
***
The African American Quilters of Baltimore is a vibrant guild of artists and craftspeople focused on sharing the tradition of quiltmaking as an expression of Black cultural heritage. The organization is a crossroads for master quilters, fine artists, hobbyists, textile collectors, and beginners to gather and exchange knowledge that keeps these traditions alive and evolving. The 43 members collaborate to curate exhibitions, workshops, retreats, and meetings promoting quilting as an art form. Established in 1989 by internationally renowned quilt artist Barbara Pietila, the guild is one of thousands in the United States. But few share their focus on nourishing Black quilters.
The sisterhood cultivated in the guild is a powerful magnet, pulling members in from out of town and even out of state. Members have joined from Connecticut and Delaware, and one testifies she joined while living in upstate New York, driving down to Baltimore to attend meetings or joining on Zoom when she couldn’t. When I mention that my own grandmother is a quilter living in Philadelphia, Pitt insists that I bring her to a guild meeting show-and-tell. The thought of this possibility melts me into a smile. Burley shares that she is part of a Maryland guild much closer to her home in Catonsville, but feels drawn to AAQB for its sense of belonging.
Charlene Cook, who has been quilting since 2023, tells me her presence in the guild has waxed and waned over the years, but quilting has never stopped bringing her peace. The meditative practice was healing for her during times of unemployment and stress. “It was my therapy. When I sat at that machine I didn’t worry about if I was making money or not.”
Starting the monthly guild meeting, president of AAQB Angelia Rice steps to the podium at the front of the community hall in West Baltimore’s St. Bartholomew Church. The room of 40 women lend their attention, slowly at first, then at once rapt as she begins to speak.
“Morning, guild sisters,” she says. “Let’s take a deep breath together and let it go. Leave behind the day’s busyness and settle into this moment. We gather to celebrate creativity, the joy of color, fabric, and form coming together. We honor patience, the steady rhythm of straight stitches —”
Giggles break out across the room. Rice, too, drops her head to chuckle at her own joke. Straight stitches — the kind of perfection that is both virtue and vice, an artistic ideal that each quilter builds their own relationship to within their work. Some reject it entirely, working in improvisational and asymmetrical blocks. These are evidence of African designs and techniques infused into American craft. Others strive for precise seams, a defining aspect of traditional North American patterns.
The meeting begins to unfold with spirited reports from committee leaders. Sandra Smith reminds the group to submit blocks for the upcoming raffle quilt, a large-scale album quilt that will be raffled off to fundraise for the group in 2026. Carol Burnside shares upcoming quilt shows that her committee is curating — a Black History Month program at a church in Havre de Grace, the biannual AAQB show in Fall 2026, and a workshop at Port Discovery for youth. LaJoy Mosby, president of the National African American Historical and Genealogical Society, requests support from the group in assembling a traditional Baltimore album quilt.
Across from Rice at the podium, members display their quilt block of the month. December’s challenge is a gingerbread house pattern which no two quilters seem to have interpreted the same. Beside me, Mary Walker, a quilter for about 20 years, observes the lilting windows of her block, a toasty gingerbread house against a pitch black night. The slanted lines give them movement, making the warm, golden fabric dance. The house feels alive, and absolutely cozy.
“My lines are crooked,” she sucks her teeth. “Look how crooked it is!”
After about an hour, the group breaks to enjoy the potluck laid out in the back of the room. Old friends catch up over a hot cups of chili and pack up homemade cookies for the road. Towering public figures join around the table, completely human and devoid of mythology. Fiber artist and former councilwoman Vera Hall visits with her son. Art historian and curator Lowery Stokes Sims, PhD, discusses religious philosophy at the membership table. Attendees rifle through boxes of free scrap fabric and patterns. A feeling of being at home settles over the room.
***
“Let it be known that it is the quiltmakers, and not anyone else, who determine what the quilt art of their time and culture will be,” Black feminist artist and activist Faith Ringgold wrote in her 1998 preface to Carolyn Mazloomi’s “Spirits of the Cloth.”
Ringgold’s words — and indeed her life’s work — aimed to shatter the perception of quilts as domestic decoration, elevating their status in African American and American culture at large. It is not critics, curators, or collectors who decide what quilts have impact, Ringgold reminds us — that power belongs to its makers. “Along with jazz, quilting is the uniquely American contribution to world art that bears the legacy of our African heritage and carries it into our common future,” Ringgold wrote.
Art historian and quilter Leslie King-Hammond, PhD, tells me the pivotal moment for public recognition of African American quilt makers was the 2002 show “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” a comprehensive retrospective of quilts from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, from 1930 to 2000, displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. Following that exhibition, scholars and critics began to recognize African contributions to the American art canon, interpreting and collecting quilts with an evident connection to African fiber arts and textile patterns. Despite what King-Hammond describes as a cataclysmic awakening, the acceptance of Black quilts as fine art remained limited to a singular aesthetic sensibility. Only the techniques and styles shared by Gee’s Bend quilts are what white scholars considered authentic African American quilts.
The historical erasure of Black quilting in galleries and museums was an intentional effort to denigrate Black and African genius, minimize these contributions to American cultural power, and to alienate the working classes from the spiritual importance of material culture in favor of consumerism.
The methods practiced by Black women in small town Alabama in the mid-20th century were certainly not exhaustive of what was happening for Black quilters at large in the United States, much like hip hop didn’t start and end in the Bronx, nor did the Harlem Renaissance fail to reach outside of the New York borough. The awareness that Black art is not a monolith is more widespread today than at the turn of the century perhaps, but we cannot chalk the classism or racism of the art world and its custodians up to good-natured ignorance, or even hubris. Its function is to control dominant narratives circulating in our culture, manipulating who is seen and in what ways, often in support of deadly social realities. The historical erasure of Black quilting in galleries and museums was an intentional effort to denigrate Black and African genius, minimize these contributions to American cultural power, and to alienate the working classes from the spiritual importance of material culture in favor of consumerism.
“We come from a people who were deeply committed to fiber and fabric and telling stories in ways that resonated and kept our cultures alive,” King-Hammond says over the phone. She tells me that quilting emerged out of a need for cultural continuity and resilience for African Americans in the early Americas. “Having limited opportunities to express ourselves in the early years of history in the United States, fiber became a way to continue that tradition to commemorate and to show the resilience of our culture. We did so with such inventiveness and such brilliance and such a remarkable artistry that we have made a lasting impression on the culture of America.”
The relatively recent shift in public regard for African American quilts is owed to the community organizing and truth-telling of artists like Mazloomi. Mazloomi, a masterful quilter, curator, and historian, released “Spirits of the Cloth” in 1998, offering the first extensive overview of over 150 contemporary Black and African American quilts. Mazloomi’s work kicked down the door for Black quilters to be seen and see themselves as fine artists, recognizing new and innovative styles they were exploring beyond the Gee’s Bend tradition. Quilts sewn with jazz sensibilities, hip hop principles, hoodoo remedies, Egyptological study, and more were finally recognized as authentic quilts of the Black and African American tradition. Thus, Mazloomi’s scholarship paved the way for the contemporary revival in curatorial interest in African American quilting.
The presence of Baltimore in Black art history can be found everywhere when you know to look for it — writing this piece, I opened Mazloomi’s book to find that one of the first full-page images is a quilt by Pietila, the visionary founder of the African American Quilters of Baltimore. This guild of fiber artists and crafts people has been an artistic hub for legendary quilters like the late Catherine Wooten and Suzanne Coley. Members today have been mentored by a generation of master-level quilters, passing along the tradition into future generations of Baltimore’s Black fiber arts movement.
The presence of Baltimore in Black art history can be found everywhere when you know to look for it.
The AAQB continues to be a leader in the cultural heritage of quilting, a rising star in the art world, and an engine of Baltimore’s creative economy. In 2022, King-Hammond worked with AAQB as a historical consultant for the FX series adapting Octavia Butler’s “Kindred,” a story which takes place in part on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The quilters were adamant, King-Hammond says, about creating props that were authentic to the period. They designed and fabricated quilts, headwraps, embroidery, pouches, and other artifacts to represent Maryland’s fiber arts. The deep reverence King-Hammond holds for the AAQB is mutual — following their collaboration, she tells me that someone had wordlessly paid the membership fees for her and fellow curator Stokes-Sims to join the guild.
***
Show-and-tell is the cherry on top of monthly guild meetings. The gatherings finish with this storytelling and knowledge exchange, a ritual leaving attendees with a competitive push toward the mountains of terrestrial UFOs (unfinished objects) awaiting them at home. This is the open mic of the quilt meeting, where attendees sign up to show new projects to the group and speak on its meaning to them.
The spirit of competition during show-and-tell is not about winners or losers, but proudly upholding the discipline that quilting requires. It is about allowing your expression of fine craft to be witnessed, even in its imperfections. It is about love for Black culture and Black people.
The chairs are full and the women are sat, legs crossed and leaning forward to peer at the stippling of fiber artist Smith’s quilt block. Its rich texture reflects the 60 hours of work poured into the piece. Smith will teach this technique at the upcoming retreat, a promise that excites the group.
Rice tells me that her first show-and-tell about six years ago left her feeling intimidated. That lit a fire underneath her, feeding her hunger to learn more. Cutting her teeth as an artist outside of her day job working in IT, Rice’s confidence grew as she saw how people responded to her quilts. Today Rice offers a mocha quilt to the show-and-tell, a pattern with a gentle gradient of brown fabrics ranging from vanilla cream to coffee bean. It’s clear from her ease in front of the group that the impostor syndrome has faded to the background. Rice executes both playfully and diligently — not a seam out of place. Her vision for the guild includes one day having their own brick-and-mortar building for programming, expanding their educational offerings, and becoming a hub for textile art.
Gasps rise from the guild as Tonya Mason, one of many who hold a PhD in the group, unfurls her quilt. Floating in a sea of patterned black, floral wedding rings clasp onto one another like a promise. Brightly colored African textiles saturate the classic double wedding ring patchwork with depth and passion. The symmetry in the piece is hypnotic, and I almost miss her story about the couple who inspired the quilt. Later, Kelli Shimabukuro shares a quilt made with strips of scrap fabric sandwiched between a gradient of gray fabrics. Its pattern is exciting and commands the eye, but the technique is hard to distinguish between blocks. One audience member crouches next to the quilt to examine the intricate detail up close. Another calls from the audience, “Can you show us where the blocks are?” The artist obliges, sharing her process gleefully.
Trained visual artists like Ellen Blalock find a creative home at the show-and-tell too, sharing works in knitting, crochet, beading, weaving, garments and more. Blalock, a (mostly) retired photojournalist, shows a three-foot-tall sculptural doll composed of yarn and dyed cotton with a ceramic mask.
“I’ve been really interested in the masculine warrior figure,” she says. Her gaze is contemplative as she cradles the doll on her hip. She doesn’t have a name for him yet, but sees him as part of a series of warrior figures, integrating her practice in fiber arts and ceramics.
At last, Bailey-Jones stands side by side with Burley and others who helped put the Coppin State quilt together at the front of the room.
She shares what Coppin means to her as an alum, and about the warm welcome they’ve received from Naiva and April Danielle Lewis, the director of Westside Open Works. Bailey-Jones describes the quilt club and the weeks of hard work the group has put in, acknowledging how many hands were part of constructing the colorful piece — cutting and stitching and designing and applying appliqué.
The Coppin t-shirt quilt face is revealed to the AAQB with a flourish. Its royal blue and gold hues beam on the backs of the appliqué figures — Black girls, alive and at play. The room hums its approval.