Freedom Quilt, Jessie B. Telfair, 1983
Self-Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum is the big summer show this year at the Saint Louis Art Museum. This traveling exhibit opened here just this week. We saw it on Free Friday, because the SLAM-mer is “dedicated to art and free to all”, at least on Fridays. It was an interesting show, full of many eclectic works. I chose this quilt as the graphic for this post, because of its strong, vibrant colors, the colors of the American flag and for its message. The artist has successfully invoked the power of a single repeated word. A word that has reverberated throughout the history of the United States, from slavery, through the Freedom Marches of the sixties, to Ferguson today. Telfair lost her job in a school kitchen as a result of registering to vote. The bitterness of that experience still burned years later and inspired this quilt.
Wait…what? She registered to vote, and as a result lost her job?? Seriously, some school decided that onenof their food service employees did not deserve the right to vote?!?!
I’d like to know more about this…
Her voting and firing occurred in Parrott, Georgia in the 1960s. That was the way it was back then. Lived, 1913-1986, died 3 years after finishing this quilt.
Thanks. Still cannot get my mind around a culture that – so many years after women won the right to vote – continued to deny them that right.
Until the 1960s that right was only generally granted to white women.