The powerful quilts of Harriet Powers (1837-1910), a former Athens, Georgia slave, continue to capture our imagination today. Her two-known creations, the Bible Quilt and the Pictorial Quilt, have independently survived since stitched more than a century ago. Over the years, thousands of museum visitors to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have stood transfixed viewing her artwork. Powers' two quilts are arguably the most well-known and cited coverings in American quilt history. But, until today, no one has told the entire, dramatic story of how these two quilts, one of which initially sold for $5, were coveted, cared for, and cherished for decades in private homes before emerging as priceless, national treasures. This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers' Bible Quilts and Other Pieces brings to light new, exciting facts - many never before published: complete exhibition history for both known quilts; proof Harriet Powers was a literate, award-winning quilter, who stitched at least five quilts and promoted her own artwork; profiles of the two nineteenth century women who sought to purchase the Bible Quilt; profiles of the three men who once owned the Pictorial Quilt; unveiling of a young artist who embellished the Pictorial Quilt; and the name of the person who first made the connection in the twentieth century that Harriet Powers stitched both quilts. This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers' Bible Quilts and Other Pieces is the most comprehensive resource guide on this influential African American quilter. The book includes nearly 200 bibliographic references, most annotative, including books, exhibition catalogs, newspapers, plays, poetry, interactive map and more. For the first time ever, readers are provided with clues and encouraged to search for Harriet Powers' lost 1882 Lord's Supper Quilt. This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers' Bible Quilts and Other Pieces is written by Kyra E. Hicks, a quilter whose story quilts have appeared in over forty group exhibitions in places such as the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, NY, the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the American Folk Art Museum in NY. Hicks is the author of Black Threads: An African American Quilting Sourcebook and Martha Ann's Quilt for Queen Victoria. She lives in Arlington, Virginia.
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About the Author
Kyra E. Hicks is a marketing professional and quilter. She was so mesmerized after seeing Eva Ungar Grudin's 1990 exhibition, "Stitching Memories: African-American Story Quilts," that she began to teach herself to create her own quilts. "I found my voice that afternoon in the museum," she remembers. Today, Kyra's quilts have been included in more than forty exhibitions in venues such as the American Craft Museum in New York, the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum in Hartford. She hosts the African American quilting news blog, Black Threads.
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Kyra E. Hicks was mesmerized after seeing Eva Ungar Grudin's 1990 exhibition, "Stitching Memories: African-American Story Quilts," that she began to teach herself to create her own quilts. "I found my voice that afternoon in the museum," she remembers. Today, Kyra's quilts have been included in more than 40 group exhibitions. She hosts the African American quilting news blog, Black Threads. Kyra resides in Arlington, VA.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
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.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you like mystery stories, quilts or quilt history, and, particularly, if you are one of the legions of persons who admire or have heard of the two famous Harriet Powers quilts, this is a "MUST" read!
Kyra Hicks is an extraordinary researcher who will tenaciously follow a lead wherever it takes her - intellectually and physically. "This I Accomplish" - actual words of Harriet Powers - allows you to follow Hicks as she discovers and uncovers important, previously unknown, DOCUMENTED facts about Mrs. Powers.
Swearing me to secrecy, Kyra periodically shared information as she returned from trips, found documents, located people, etc. One of her disclosures about a mischievous child had me running to get a large photo of the quilt while we were on the telephone. It is hilarious! Believe me, those tidbits did not mar my reading the book. I literally could not put it down, except for brief periods, until I completed it.
Kyra knows that she has not learned all that there is to know about the Harriet Powers story. Not only does she challenge others to continue the research, she - unselfishly - points out possible leads to follow. As one of "Harriet's Daughters" ( www.MarleneOBryantSeabrook.com/powers2.html ), I thank Kyra Hicks for this book!
Kyra Hicks is an extraordinary researcher who will tenaciously follow a lead wherever it takes her - intellectually and physically. "This I Accomplish" - actual words of Harriet Powers - allows you to follow Hicks as she discovers and uncovers important, previously unknown, DOCUMENTED facts about Mrs. Powers.
Swearing me to secrecy, Kyra periodically shared information as she returned from trips, found documents, located people, etc. One of her disclosures about a mischievous child had me running to get a large photo of the quilt while we were on the telephone. It is hilarious! Believe me, those tidbits did not mar my reading the book. I literally could not put it down, except for brief periods, until I completed it.
Kyra knows that she has not learned all that there is to know about the Harriet Powers story. Not only does she challenge others to continue the research, she - unselfishly - points out possible leads to follow. As one of "Harriet's Daughters" ( www.MarleneOBryantSeabrook.com/powers2.html ), I thank Kyra Hicks for this book!
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Kyra Hicks has added so much to previously-available information about Harriet Powers and her quilts. I really appreciate the amount of details she includes all through the book and in the almost 200 entries in an annotated Bibliography.
This is a book that is difficult to put down, and one that will serve as a reference for all who are interested in Harriet Powers and her renowned quilts.
This is the third book I have seen, written by Ms. Hicks, and none of them have been disappointing. Quite the opposite effect, I'd say! This book is charming in the way the information is presented and because it is such a thorough look at the subject, although as any researcher knows ... there is always more to uncover!
This is a book that is difficult to put down, and one that will serve as a reference for all who are interested in Harriet Powers and her renowned quilts.
This is the third book I have seen, written by Ms. Hicks, and none of them have been disappointing. Quite the opposite effect, I'd say! This book is charming in the way the information is presented and because it is such a thorough look at the subject, although as any researcher knows ... there is always more to uncover!
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
MUST HAVE FOR QUILTERS
GREAT BOOK...AWESOME LADY !!! IT WILL INSPIRE YOU TO QUILT NOT JUST FOR BEAUTY BUT FOR MEANING. I WAS TOUCHED BY HER DEVOTION TO HELPING OTHERS!
Published 19 days ago by YVONNE S. REEDER
4.0 out of 5 stars
quilting find
I love this book the title was interesting and the contents was super. I enjoy just reading this history. There needs to be more of this art in books.
Published 10 months ago by phillips
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dignity, Strength, Grace
I've been fascinated by these quilts for years, and had the general knowledge of them. Yesterday, when I discovered a book had been written about Harriett Powers, I purchased it... Read more
Published 17 months ago by C Quilts
3.0 out of 5 stars
Mysteries revealed
The story behind the quilts was fascinating. I have admired this work of art for years and appreciated all of the background information supplied in the book. Read more
Published 21 months ago by V
2.0 out of 5 stars
this I accomplish:harriet powers bible quilt and other pieces
A good review of how she researched it, but not much about the quilt itself..what did the imagery mean? I was disappointed.
Published on April 22, 2011 by austin cole
5.0 out of 5 stars
The gratetful historian
"I am grateful for Kyra's books with her impressive historical references. It allows me to get additional information for projects that I am working on and it truly inspires me as... Read more
Published on April 7, 2011 by Pam Tilley Connectional Historiographer AMEC
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic book!
This book is so good. I wondered what new information could possibly be found, but Kyra found it. I was intriqued over and over as I read. A great and easy read.
Published on March 29, 2011 by alumumba
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting
I enjoyed this story very much. The book, which I felt read like a novel, was very informative and full of wonderful facts about the quilts themselves. Read more
Published on June 1, 2010 by nancy murphy
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wow! I kept leaping out of my chair!
I have long been a huge fan of the two known Harriet Powers quilts and the researchers who have brought these textiles from anonymity to their proper place in the history of... Read more
Published on March 21, 2010 by Eleanor Knowles
5.0 out of 5 stars
Kyra Hicks has written a wonderful book! I recommend it highly.
When Kyra Hicks started the research that became this book, Harriet Powers' Bible Quilt was in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Read more
Published on March 5, 2010 by David P. Evans
