Nina Fennell is one of the Quilt Circle’s elders. When she passed away recently, her family donated the fibers she left behind to the group. They began sorting through the materials and quickly discovered quilt blocks that she started, but never completed.
Two of the quilts in the exhibition are quilts Fennell began that her quilt circle family finished in her honor. The group arranged fabric from her home into a traditional wagon wheel pattern, building on the foundation Fennel laid.
In quiltmaking, there is often no single person a quilt can be attributed to. Many hands sew single stitches to create a shared piece of art and history. The “Black Angel” quilt, also on view at the Carver, is another outcome of a collaborative endeavor. Almost all of the group’s members had a hand in the project and say each block was cut, sewn, embroidered and binded with intention and lots of love.”
When the quilt circle meets in the new year, they will pick up where they left off, working collectively to complete a single hand-sewn quilt.
Moore Harris says the group’s members are practicing the art of “taking a story and expanding on it.”
Dr. Lillian Jones joined the quilt circle four years ago and has two quilts in the exhibition.
“Lillian is the historian of our group,” Moore Harris told the Texas Observer.
Jones’ “Tex Mex Underground Railroad” quilt has taken on a life of its own since the exhibition began. “You definitely have much better quilters in the group than me,” Jones demured. “But I do love the history and the stories.”
She used cotton fiber, dimensional paints, pipe cleaners, embroidery, appliqué, and traditional quilting techniques to sew a Black liberation history often omitted from textbooks. In 1821, Vicente Ramón Guerrero Saldaña became the second president of Mexico and abolished slavery in most of the country. Guerrero was a man of African, Indigenous, and European descent. Jones’s quilt illustrates the route traveled through Texas by an estimated 3,000-10,000 formerly enslaved people seeking liberation by crossing the Mexican border.
This unfolding of events provoked so-called Texas’ secession from Mexico in 1836, the Mexican-American War in 1848, and became an underlying cause of the so-called U.S. Civil War in 1865.
“These are not the things that are taught in school,” Moore Harris said. “You know how it is—people don’t give you the whole story.”
Since the exhibition began, the group has been contacted by multiple museums and historical organizations seeking to commission quilts that tell other stories conveniently omitted from the canon of history.
“I never would have dreamed that people would be so interested in this quilt,” Jones said with a laugh.