“To Play One or To Be One, That is the Question! (Hattie McDaniel)” by Nneka Gamble, Victoria, Texas.
Exhibit curator Susanne M. Jones’s own quilt included black-and-white images of the four girls killed in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, printed on filmy organza that fills an outline of Alabama. In the center of her creation, Jones thread-sketched a portrait of her mother-in-law, Marna Williams, surrounded by raw-edged appliqué vignettes of Williams’s civil rights work in 1960s Birmingham. “She is not well known,” Jones says. “But she was my hero.”
HERStory Quilts: A Celebration of Strong Women is on display at the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky, through April 9, 2019.
