Sharbreon Plummer

Before connecting to art, I think it’s important to consider how Blackness in abstraction is seen. Abstract art, along with canon art history, has not been a historical homeplace for the art or creativity of Black people. Nevertheless, abstraction offers an interesting consideration of Black life and vice versa.

Cambridge dictionary defines abstraction as “the quality of existing as or representing an idea, a feeling, etc. and not a material object, or something that has this quality.” It is pulling away from the representational or physical to present something beyond it. I feel that abstraction is deeply intertwined with Blackness/Black existence. It’s everywhere. The survival of Black people in a place that was never meant for us is thanks, in part, to our adaptability and our insistence to maintain ways of being that are felt and known but not always tangible in material forms. In a sense, being illegible to dominant culture, or whiteness, has been a central part of Black folks’ existence both within and outside of society. Our thoughts, musings, and interpretations are held as intracultural connective tissue and remain an ongoing mystery to those removed from diasporic knowledge.

Quilts are an extension of Black abstraction. Unfortunately, discussions facilitated around the medium have been shortsighted, and those led by non-Black scholars have historically been imbued with self-serving projections (i.e., elevating one’s status as scholar, expert, etc.). If researchers cared enough to ask questions from a place of appreciation and care, informed by Black peoples’ ways of being—rather than extracting knowledge for their own purpose and profit—the artistic landscape would be vastly different. They must also ask themselves, “should I be telling this story?” But that’s a topic for another day.

In order to care about quilts made by Black women, you need to actually care about Black women. You need to not only understand our relationship to labor, production, and materiality in the West, and the fact that we continue to not be fully given the space to be contemplative and still with our thoughts, but also be responsible enough to not reduce our story solely to those components. Quilting, for many Black women, is a way to claim peace and autonomy. If abstraction is shaped by idea and feeling, then the lives and humanity of everyday Black women, and what informs them, should be treasured and cherished as sites of inquiry and deep possibility. There remains a need to sit with the modes of reflection and observation that shape the creative eye within Black quilters. Even the most seemingly “random” presentation of improvisation in a quilt derives from a place of deep consideration. If the goal is to change the way the history of abstraction is told, then the way the histories of Black women are told, particularly poor Black women of the South, must also change.