A sensation from the moment it was first exhibited, since 1886 the Bible Quilt and its reprise, the Pictorial Quilt, made by Georgia native and former slave Harriet Powers has been featured in more than 150 news articles, books, poems and plays. It is thus both remarkable and embarrassing that not until Kyra Hicks's latest work has anyone bothered to verify the received wisdom about the woman who is arguably the world's best-known quilter.
Hicks's easy, conversational and very personal tone belies the painstaking care of her research. What apparently began as an annotated bibliography snowballed into an astonishingly detailed provenance which both documents the lives of key figures in the quilts' history and refutes commonly held, if perennially evolving, assumptions about Powers.
It soon becomes clear to the reader that from the first, everyone who saw Powers's Bible Quilt regarded it as not only unique, but a work of art - high praise given its abstract design, the status of quilts as homely craft, and the tenuous role of black women in turn-of-the-century rural Georgia. Among the visitors of both races crowding to see it at the 1886 Northeast Georgia Fair was Jennie Smith, a white art teacher at an Athens girls' school. Smith was so captivated she tracked down Powers and offered to buy the quilt. After three meetings in four years, she convinced Powers to sell, agreeing to supply the avid quilter with fabric scraps and granting her what can best be described as visitation rights to the quilt. Smith carefully recorded Powers's description of the quilt's subjects, and exhibited it at least once thereafter, identifying Powers as the maker. In 1969 Smith's executor donated the quilt to the Smithsonian, and again it became a sensation.
Other Powers admirers purchased or commissioned a variation now known as the Pictorial Quilt, presented to Charles Cuthbert Hall in 1898 probably when he became Union Theological Seminary's new president. For years Hall displayed it on the wall of his summer house, and even as a child, Hall's great-grandson knew the quilt was "a living thing, not meant to be on a bed, but meant to be art." Like the Bible Quilt, the Pictorial Quilt long remained in appreciative private hands; then in 1961, art collector Maxim Karolik acquired it on behalf of Boston's Museum of Fine Art, where it has been on display since 1975. (It is currently in storage while the MFA undergoes renovation.)
Hicks's tenacious pursuit of primary sources uncovered crucial details about Powers's life which future researchers cannot ignore. She also confirms suspicions that these were not Powers's only quilts. In fact, Powers appears to have been something of a competitor, winning at least one prize for another 1880s quilt. Powers herself describes a fourth quilt's distinctive appearance; is it still hidden, unidentified, in some collection?
It is hard for any diligent researcher to resist sharing every tidbit we unearth; too often, every toy is our favorite. But this can distract rather than illuminate. The reader feels ungrateful complaining that Hicks sometimes provides *too much* information about peripheral characters; nevertheless it is hard not to wish that, for example, the thirteen pages on Karolik's life had instead been devoted to Powers's early years (rarely discussed in other sources) and careful descriptions of the quilts' materials and techniques, both of which Hicks seems to have omitted. But this is praising with faint damns. Hicks's main fault is modesty: she seems to view her book as supplemental when it should be the axis on which any reading on Powers revolves.
The author does yeoman's work viewing her subjects in historical context. A self-identified Christian familiar with Biblical iconography, she avoids the common pitfall of treating Powers's imagery as inscrutable and exotic, and she refrains from Rorschach-test psychologizing. While frankly confronting the patronizing racism of another era, she is also heroically "slow to wrath" (although the reader is baffled by her observation that "no African-American made quilts [were] included" in the groundbreaking 1971 Whitney quilt exhibition, as none of those quilts' makers appear to have been identified.)
Hicks might be amused that white vaudevillian and "Negro mimic" Lucine Finch, fabricator in 1914 of a grotesquely stereotyped "interview" with Powers (who had died four years before), appears to have been no respecter of persons regardless of race - even when she knew them personally. One review sneered that as Mother Goose in her friend's operetta, Finch "unfortunately trusted to her own capacity for making up things on the spur of the moment in preference to adhering to the lines of the part." Hicks's careful work marks a break with this kind of poetic license, and our appreciation of Powers is better for it.