Quiltmaker Carolyn Mazloomi feels most comfortable when she’s wearing black. In fact, it’s one of the key colors in her wall-size quilts, which are mostly created with black-and-white designs that she draws and then has them fabricated. Occasionally there’s a splash of color, but it’s rare.
“I love black and white because it is very stark and dramatic, and there is nothing to get between the viewer and the message,” said Mazloomi, a nationally acclaimed quilt artist and lecturer. “It is in your face. It is easy to decipher. There is a lot of symbolism, too, when you think in terms of relations and this country, everything is black and white. Everything boils down to race.”
American history, Black lives and the ongoing fight for social justice are topics she explores in her big, bold quilts. They cover the walls of two galleries and the hallway of the Textile Center in her solo exhibition “Stitching Black Legacy: The Quilts of Carolyn Mazloomi.”
Mazloomi, born in 1948, grew up in Louisiana in the Jim Crow segregated South. She holds a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Southern California, and worked for the Federal Aviation Administration as a crash site investigator. She and her husband, engineer Rezvan Mazloomi, moved from Los Angeles to Ohio in 1986 to raise a family.
She founded the Women of Color Quilters Network in 1985. She’s a quilt collector, too. Thirty-three quilts from her collection are on view in the exhibition “We Gather at the Edge: Contemporary Quilts by Black Women Artists” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Quilts galore
The history of African American women’s quilting dates back to pre-Civil War times, serving as modes of self-determination and community support. Mazloomi is working in the tradition of narrative quiltmaking, not improvisational quilting that many know through the quilts of Gee’s Bend.
“The narrative quilt is considered foundational to Black culture specifically, certainly during antebellum times,” said Tracy Vaughn-Manley, assistant professor of Black Studies at Northwestern University. “What [quilt artist] Harriet Powers was doing was using her quilt, the narrative of the Bible, to teach people the biblical stories, to teach them the Bible, to ultimately teach them salvation.”
Mazloomi’s large-scale quilts range from 50 to 80 inches in height and width. There are stories of the civil rights movement, iconic Black leaders, immigration and the present-day reality of the president’s attempt to dismantle more than 60 years of progress.
