Authors

Hannah Amuka is Coordinator of Gallery Experiences at the High Museum of Art. She works in the Interpretation division of the High’s Learning and Civic Engagement department to develop didactic materials for visitors related to the museum’s collection and special exhibitions. Her work is grounded in experiences that promote creativity, wonder, and learning opportunities that invite visitors to shift previously held views through intentional, respectful, and often playful provocation. Hannah has a diverse background teaching in both formal and informal art environments. Having spent countless hours in museums, galleries, and educational settings, she has developed a unique approach to interpretation that bridges the gap between the artwork and the viewer. Her ethos is based on a passion for sharing new knowledge and fostering a deeper appreciation and understanding of the world around us through visual art.

Dawn Williams Boyd was born in New Jersey and lives and works in Atlanta. Her self-described narrative “cloth paintings” chronicle seminal moments in American history. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Columbus Museum, Georgia; and Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York. She has exhibited her work at Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina; Southwest Art Center, Atlanta; Hammonds House Museum, Atlanta; Bulloch Hall, Roswell, Georgia; Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia; Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, Atlanta; Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Columbus Museum, Georgia; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; The Dodd Galleries at the University of Georgia; Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York; and Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York. She is represented by Fort Gansevoort gallery, New York.

Dr. Rita Bradley is a native of Richmond, Virginia, who has called Georgia her home for some time. Her formative years involved being immersed in art and sewing, which led to a career in fashion design. For the last twenty years, she has shared her love of art with students as a visual arts teacher. Her career has had many highlights and honors. As a doctoral student at Georgia State University, she traveled abroad to study the culture and educational system of Ethiopia. She researched Meso-American culture and textile traditions in Oaxaca, Mexico, as a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholar and also experienced Aboriginal culture in Australia as a Fund for Teachers Fellow. Her woven sculptures have been shown in exhibitions at Kennesaw State University. She continues to hone her craft while learning and making cultural connections through fiber arts one country at a time.

O.V. Brantley is a self-taught quilter since 1999 after finding her passion through the book Teach Yourself to Quilt. She has made over three hundred quilts, which she describes as autobiographical and traditional with an ethnic flair. She is a founding member and past president of the Brown Sugar Stitchers Quilt Guild and is cofounder of the Atlanta Quilt Festival, the largest African American quilt festival in the country. Her quilts have won awards at various quilt shows and been featured in several quilt publications, including Georgia Quilts: Piecing Together a History, and her work has been featured in exhibitions and festivals; several of her quilts, including Choose to Bloom, have been exhibited at the International Quilt Festival (2017, 2021). In 2019, she was commissioned by the United Negro College Fund to create a memory quilt for Oprah Winfrey. Her quilts continue to be collected and shown around the world.

Bridget R. Cooks is a scholar and curator of American art. Her research focuses on African American visual art, Black visual culture, and museum criticism. She serves as Chancellor’s Fellow and Professor of African American Studies and Art History at the University of California, Irvine. Her writing can be found widely across interdisciplinary academic publications and art exhibition catalogues; her book Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (UMass, 2011) received the inaugural James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Book Award in African American Art History. As a museum educator, she worked at Oakland Museum of California, Smithsonian Institution, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships from organizations including the Ford Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, Southern Poverty Law Center, Getty Research Institute, and California Humanities.

Destinee Filmore is a curator, art historian, and creative practitioner working as assistant curator in the Modern and Contemporary Art department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the Met, she focuses on research and curatorial projects that aim to tell a more complex history of American modernism by centering women and historically marginalized makers. Using the museum’s collection from the first half of the twentieth century, Destinee explores topics such as vernacular artistic traditions, the reception history of identity-based exhibitions, and the visual and material culture of Afro-Cosmopolitanisms. She is also the project director of On This Land, for which she leads an interdisciplinary team in creating innovative historical markers to challenge existing historical narratives and foster civic discourse. Destinee received a BA in art history from Spelman College and an MA from Williams College’s History of Art program.

Katherine “Katie” Jentleson (PhD) is Senior Curator of American Art and Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum of Art. Since joining the High in 2015, she has curated nine exhibitions, including George Voronovsky: Memoryscapes in 2023 and Patterns in Abstraction: Black Quilts from the High’s Collection, which opens in June 2024. Her exhibitions and publications have been awarded major support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Art Bridges Foundation, Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, and Terra Foundation for American Art. She has grown the High’s internationally renowned folk and self-taught art collection by more than six hundred objects, including major acquisitions of work by Voronovsky, Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, the Gee’s Bend quilters, and Henry Church. In 2022, she began a three-year term as coexecutive editor of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. She holds a BA from Cornell University and a PhD in art history from Duke University.

Marquetta Johnson is a teaching artist at the High Museum of Art and a quilter residing in Jonesboro, Georgia. She has over thirty years of teaching experience and professional development in the areas of arts integration, arts infusion, and inclusive classrooms. She has appeared on many radio and television shows discussing and demonstrating her art form, such as HGTV’s Crafters Coast to Coast. Her artwork has been featured in several magazines including Quilt Magazine and MARTA’s Marta on the Go magazine and is in many private and corporate collections such as the estate of the late B. B. King, Faith Ringgold, University of Maryland, Turner Broadcasting, and The Coca-Cola Company. She is the author of the book Hand-Dyed Quilts (Sterling, 2008) and is affiliated with VSA Arts International Network with the Kennedy Center, the NAMES Project Aids Memorial Quilt, Museum of Design Atlanta, and the High Museum of Art.

Marsha MacDowell (MFA, PhD) is a publicly engaged scholar whose work largely focuses on documentation and analysis of the production, meaning, and use of traditional material culture. She develops and implements the overwhelming majority of her work, in its design and philosophy, in collaboration with representatives of the communities her work centers on. She is curator of folk arts and quilt studies at Michigan State University Museum; professor in art, art history, and design at Michigan State University; and director of the Michigan Traditional Arts Program, the Quilt Index (quiltindex.org), and the Quilt Index’s Black Diaspora Quilt History Project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has published and curated exhibitions on African American and South African quilting.

Sharbreon Plummer (PhD) is an independent researcher, curator, and creative strategist with over fifteen years of experience in the arts and culture sector. Her research work focuses on textile traditions, artistic production, and folkways connected to Black life, especially within the South. She has facilitated and presented work at institutions such as Project Row Houses, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, Rhode Island School of Design, Americans for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and several others. A few of her creative projects include her internationally distributed zine Diasporic Threads: Black Women, Fibre and Textiles (2022) and shows such as Stitching Abolition (Weinberg Newton Gallery, 2022) and Mirrored Migration (Rush Corridor Gallery, 2017). She is the curator of the forthcoming exhibition Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South (Mississippi Museum of Art, November 2024) and author of Black Quilts: Memory, Methods and Medicine (Chronicle Books, 2026).

A passionate educator and community change agent, Stacey Watson recently served her community as a history professor at West Kentucky Community Technical College and as the director of equitable partnerships at the National Quilt Museum (NQM) in Paducah, Kentucky. She has devoted twenty years to teaching students to think critically, creating her own nationally recognized teaching technique. With her passion to educate others, she curated a quilt exhibition at NQM titled Say Your Piece—Black Women: Mothers, Martyrs, and Misunderstood, which focused on displaying quilt art to highlight issues Black women consistently face in America. She is the recipient of the NAACP Rosa M. Parks Power of One award and the Phelps Award for Excellence in Teaching. She recently served as a judge for the world’s largest modern quilt competition, QuiltCon 2024, and now works as a museum specialist in Washington, DC.

Carolyn W. White is an art quilter on a quest for knowledge and creative expression through her creative practice. She has been sewing for more than fifty-five years and quilting since 2006 after joining the Brown Sugar Stitchers Quilt Guild in Atlanta. Her work has been displayed in quilt shows and exhibitions in metro Atlanta and other Georgia venues and has been awarded several prizes and ribbons. Her quilt Awestruck before an Unforgettable Nubian Queen, or From Gee’s Bend to Royalty (2021, created during the pandemic) is in the High’s collection, and it won Best of Show at the 2021 Atlanta Quilt Festival. Another of her quilts, Three Great Leaders in the Struggle for Freedom, won first place in the African American category and Best of Show at the 2023 Atlanta Quilt Festival. She has a degree in biology and worked for the FDA for forty years.