Harriett Powers Film Project

2012

 

Left: Pictorial Quilt. Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Bequest of Maxim Karolik, 64.619


Below: Madison County and Athens (Clarke County) from J. H. Colton Map of Georgia, 1855.


About Harriett Powers

Harriett Powers’s quilts tell religious and folk stories that blend together Christian and traditional West African belief systems. Both existing quilts are accompanied by notes — written either by Mrs. Powers herself or by others — that give some of the meanings of the individual quilt patches.


Harriett Angeline Powers was born in Madison County, Georgia, a few miles north of Athens, Clarke County, in the northeastern part of the state, on October 29, 1837. She grew up under slavery on the plantation owned by Nancy Lester and family. Despite being enslaved, she learned to read and write from the Lester family children. In 1855, she married Armsted Powers. After freedom came in 1865, she lived with her husband and their children on a small farm in the Sandy Creek district of Clarke County, a few miles north of Athens. Although born into slavery, the Powers family rented land after the Civil War and bought a small plot in the 1890’s. But the farm was not sufficient to meet the family’s needs.


According to her own account, Mrs. Powers became a member of Mt. Zion Baptist Church, a rural congregation in Madison County, in 1882. She was a person self-selected or chosen by the community to carry on traditional knowledge. One of her sons, Rev. A. C. Powers, was the first clerk of another rural congregation, New Grove Baptist Church in Clarke County, where a reproduction of the Smithsonian’s Harriett Powers quilt hangs today in the foyer. Mrs. Powers was also a member of one or more fraternal lodges, including the Gospel Pilgrims.


Mrs. Powers died in Athens on January 1, 1910 and was buried in the Gospel Pilgrim Cemetery there, perhaps next to her husband, who had died the previous October.


History of the Quilts














In Harriett Powers’s quilts lies an intriguing tale of the South: the skilled work of the formerly enslaved craftsperson, a work that clearly shows the richness of its creator’s African heritage, is preserved thanks to a white patron. One of Harriett Powers’s patrons was a young art teacher named Jennie Smith, born near Athens, Georgia in 1862. Smith was herself an unusual woman, an artist with a regional reputation who had studied in her native Georgia and in Baltimore, New York, and Paris. Her artistic sensibility and upper middle-class white social background put her in a position not only to recognize the beauty, originality, and significance of Harriett Powers’s art, but also to acquire it. In addition to caring for the quilt she purchased from Powers, Smith left written comments about Powers and her work.

We know from Jennie Smith’s notes that Harriett Powers did not want to part with her creations. It was only when she and her husband were driven by extreme need in 1891 that Harriett Powers sold the quilt that now hangs in the Smithsonian to Jennie Smith. Miss Smith displayed the quilt prominently in her home and exhibited it in the Negro Building at Atlanta’s 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition.  After Jennie Smith’s death in 1946, her executor, Hal Heckman, displayed the quilt in his home for twenty years before donating it to the Smithsonian in 1968.






The quilt now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts was almost certainly made at a later date than the Smithsonian’s Bible Quilt. The quilt was acquired by Atlanta University — founded by the American Missionary Association to educate newly freed slaves after the Civil War — and offered as a gift in 1898 to the Rev. Charles Cuthbert Hall, a white trustee of the college and president of Union Theological Seminary in New York. The quilt hung in the Hall family home in Westport Point, Massachusetts for many years after Hall’s death in 1908. In 1960, Hall’s son brought the quilt to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where the Textile Curator, Adolph S. Cavallo, quickly understood its significance and convinced Maxim Karolik, a collector and patron, to buy the quilt and donate it to the Museum as part of his large collection of artworks.

 

Left: Bible Quilt or “Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.” Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. H. M. Heckman. T.14713. Slide 75-2984.

Above: Harriett Powers quilt on display at the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta. Photograph by B. W. Kilburn, Littleton, NH, 10688.

Above: The Baptism of Christ, as portrayed by Harriett Powers in the Bible Quilt owned by the Smithsonian Institution.

The image on the left commissioned by Lorene Curtis Diver, early 1896, as it appeared in “A Sermon in Patchwork,” an article by Lucine Finch, The Outlook, October 28, 1914.

On the right: the same block from a photograph taken by the Smithsonian Institution after it acquired the quilt in 1968. Slide 75-2990.