Harriet Powers: Emancipated Seamstress
As Linda Nochlin declared in her essay titled “Why Are There No Great Women Artists,” she concluded that “disadvantage may indeed be an excuse; it is not, however, an intellectual position.”[1] This statement emphasizes those artists who had worked from a place of disadvantage and thrived. Her claim holds to Black artist Harriet Powers. Powers was a freed slave from Georgia whose work displayed the start of the modern era. Powers’ Bible Quilt, 1886, is one of her most famous works. It was exhibited at the Athens Cotton Fair of 1895. Powers’ quilt was shown statewide, and Powers was finally recognized as an artist by the public. Her second work, the Pictoral Quilt, 1895, drew more attention than her first since she had already gathered quite an audience with her Bible Quilt. Both pieces showcased Powers’ ancestry with its traditional African methods of quilt making, differentiating it from other works in that era. With only two of her works preserved, Powers had arguably influenced the practice of artists in the twentieth century.
Harriet Powers was born into slavery in Clarke County, Georgia, on October 26, 1837, on a plantation owned by John and Nancy Lester. There is little information about her early life, but from what was collected, Powers married her husband Armstead in 1855 and created her first quilt after she was emancipated. The first-ever known display of her work would be at the Athens Cotton Fair of 1886, where she gained notoriety when a local artist, Oneita (“Jennie”) Virginia Smith, admired one of her quilts. Smith later wrote about her discovery of the quilt, “I have spent my whole life in the South, and am perfectly familiar with thirty patterns of quilts, but I had never seen an original design, and never a living creature portrayed in patchwork, until the year 1886, when there was held in Athens, Georgia….”[2] During the first encounter with Powers and her work, Smith had offered to acquire the quilt, but Powers refused. Four years later, due to financial difficulties resulting from the Civil War, Powers agreed to sell the quilt for $5. When Powers handed the quilt over to Smith, she had articulately described each panel of the textile. The second quilt that had survived was her Pictoral Quilt that was finished in 1898. Unlike her first quilt, she included actual events in her second one. It is surprising that Powers has so much influence on future artists with only two works. According to Cuesta Benberry, a quilt historian, Powers’ quilts have transcended popularity and are cherished to the extent that they have become virtual American icons. They have been researched because historians found similarities of West African design traditions in Powers’ textiles.
Powers and her two surviving quilts are among one of the most famous in the history of African American Folk art. Art historians took notice of how similar Powers’ quilt was to those of the Fon people of Dahomey, West Africa. African women often brought their knowledge of strip weaving, applique, and storytelling and adapted it to their new life in the United States. Plantation owners would often force the slaves to harvest cotton, wool, and hemp, which then will be spun into thread and yarn and be turned into cloth.[3] Southern women slaves were experts seamstresses, and Powers most likely learned how to applique and do patchwork from her mother or other fellow slaves. Applique is a technique in which figures or shapes are cut out of cloth are sewn onto a larger piece of background fabric, which is called a block. The background is often made from a solid color, while the figures and shapes applied to the cloth are usually cut from printed fabrics. Powers also included patchwork in her quilts. Patchwork consists of sewing together pieces of cut-up cloth. The applique would be sewn on the individual blocks of material. The blocks of cloth would then be mended together to create the front piece of fabric. The front piece would be sewn with another piece of cloth called the backing piece. Lastly, stuffing would be placed between the two cloth pieces and stitched closed to create a quilt. ,
The Bible Quilt was the piece that had artist Jennie Smith so mesmerized. This quilt, which Powers called “the offspring of my brain”[4], is a visual proclamation of her artistic intelligence and spiritual vision. The quilt was both hand- and machine-stitched, containing 299 separate pieces of fabric. There is an outline sewn around the border of the now faded watermelon pink-colored quilt with empty spaces between the eleven asymmetric panels. When Powers handed the quilt over to Smith, Powers described in detail what the imagery of each panel was. “The quilt illustrates Adam and eve in the first two panels, Satan in panel 3, Cain and Abel in panels 4 and 5, Jacob’s ladder in panel 6, Christ’s baptism and crucifixion in 7 and 8, Judas in the ninth panel, the Last Supper in the tenth, and the nativity in the last panel.”[5] Formalism is applied to Powers’ work when she used darker and bolder colors like black and red to showcase each scene’s more spiritual and less realistic aspects. For example, she used a combination of red and black stripes to emphasize the serpent-like creature that wanted to tempt Eve. The display of Satan in entirely black indicated that he is the source of all evil and darkness. Powers also used black and red on the ladder to focus the audience’s attention on the angel that was looking over on Jacob. She also took a feminist approach when depicting the human figures in her quilt. For instance, in the first panel with Adam and Eve, Eve is shown to be wearing a dress while Adam is assumed to be in pants. Powers could not read or write, so she endeavored to put the words that she heard into visualizations. She used contrasting colors to emphasize certain aspects of the quilt or cutting the figures into different shapes to understand who is who or what is what to best capture what she had imagined in her head.
Powers’ second creation was the Pictoral Quilt which was created between 1895 and 1898. It was commissioned by the wives of the faculty members at Atlanta University, who had seen her previous work. It was a gift presented to Dr. Charles Cuthbert Hall, a white minister who was the longtime chairman of the board of trustees of Atlanta University and championed higher education for African Americans.[6] Like her previous quilt, the Pictoral is an innovative example of visual storytelling. In the Pictoral, Powers integrated scenes from the Bible as well as actual events. It contained fifteen panels and was divided by three rows and five columns. The fifteen images illustrated five real-life events, while the other ten is interpretations of Bible verses. The first panel depicts a man named Job praying. The second panel represents May 19, 1780, when seven stars were seen in the sky at noon. Darkness descended on the world, and it was comprehended as the end of the world. The third panel showed Moses lifting a serpent, and the fourth was Adam and Eve in the garden. In the fifth scene, John is baptizing Christ, and a dove is hovering over them. The sixth pictorial shows John being cast off of a boat and being eaten by sea animals. The seventh panel is meant to illustrate that God has made two of each kind. The eighth is the day of falling stars on November 13, 1833. The ninth is a continuation of the seventh panel, showing two of each animal. Angels and beasts of Revelations are shown in the tenth panel. The cold night of February 10, 1895, is indicated in the eleventh panel when creatures of all kinds froze, and the red light night of 1846 is depicted in the twelfth. The thirteenth scene is the punishment of wealthy people. The fourteenth scene also shows the continuation of pairs of creatures. Finally, the fifteenth panel shows the crucifixion of Christ. In her most recent quilt, Powers used more cooler tones than in her Bible Quilt. This quilt is worked with beige, pink, mauve, orange, dark red, gray-green, and shades of blue cotton. Powers made her figures with simple shapes and designs so that anyone could easily comprehend what Powers is trying to convey in her visual stories. Since Powers was disadvantaged because she could not read or write, she created pictures so that people like her could have to chance to enjoy the stories she once did.
A freed slave, an African American female, Harriet Powers has rightfully earned her place as one of the more well-known artists in art history. She had mastered the art of quilt making while being newly emancipated. She also embraced the techniques of her African ancestors and was able to use those techniques to visually tell a story. Powers came from a very disadvantaged position; however, she intelligently used her experience to grow as an artist. She created an everlasting legacy with her biblical quilts.
[1] Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Art and Sexual Politics: Women’s Liberation, Women Artists, and Art History, eds. Hess, Thomas B., and Elizabeth C. Baker (New York: Mac Millan Publishing Co., Inc., 1971) found at University of Pennsylvania Writing Center,
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Nochlin-Linda_Why-Have-There-Been-No-Great-Women-Artists.pdf.
[2] “1885-1886 Harriet Powers’s Bible Quilt,” National Museum of American History, https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_556462
[3] Lisa Farrington, African-Amercian Art: A Visual and Cultural History, (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 46.
[4] “Harriet Powers: Bible Quilt,” ArtWay, 28 March 2021, https://www.artway.eu/content.php?id=3112&lang=en&action=show
[5] Lisa Farrington, African-Amercian Art: A Visual and Cultural History, (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 48.
[6] Pictorial Quilt,” Museum of Fine Arts Boston, https://collections.mfa.org/objects/116166
