“As an artist, I strongly believe art has the capacity to touch the spirit, engage, educate, and heal in ways that words alone cannot.”
~ Dr. Carolyn L. Mazloomi
Founded by Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi in 1985, Women of Color Quilters Network (wcqn.org) is a non-profit national organization whose mission is to educate, preserve, exhibit, promote, and document quilts made by African Americans.
Trained as an aerospace engineer, Carolyn Mazloomi turned her sites and tireless efforts in the 1980s to bring the many unrecognized contributions of African American quilt artists to the attention of the American people as well as the international art communities.
A major force as an artist in her own right, Carolyn Mazloomi’s quilts have been exhibited extensively in venues such as the Mint Museum, American Folk Art Museum in New York City, National Civil Rights Museum, Museum of Art and Design, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi, curator, historian, and artist, talks about the quilts created for the exhibition Black Pioneers: Legacy in the American West.
Her pictorial narrative quilts make plain her personal themes: family life, women’s rights, political freedom, and musical legacy. Her own quilts have been included in more than 74 exhibits and she herself has curated 21 extensive exhibits of quilts made by members of the Women of Color Quilters Network, many of them traveling exhibits.
Among the many exhibitions she has curated is “Still We Rise: Race, Culture and Visual Conversations”, which visually surveys 400 years of African American history. It is the largest traveling exhibit of African American quilts ever mounted.
Dr. Mazloomi’s quilts can be found in private collections around the world as well in distinguished museum collections in the United States. To date Dr. Mazloomi has published twelve books highlighting African American-made quilts.
Her artistic work, as well as her defense of solid research, has disrupted long-standing myths about African American quilts, myths much debated among quilt historians and quilters alike, and thus moved the conversation about African American quilt history forward to more a solid academic footing.
In honor of the 55th anniversary of the Freedom Riders, members of the Women of Color Quilters Network featured quilts that tell the story of the African American experience in “We Who Believe in Freedom.” The quilts present commentary on the Civil Rights movement and issues of race in America, building upon “symbols of liberation, resistance and empowerment.”
Visit carolynlmazloomi.com.