Awestruck before an Unforgettable Nubian Queen, or From Gee’s Bend to Royalty by Carolyn W. White

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This quilt won Best in Show at the Atlanta Quilt Festival (AQF) in 2021. AQF was founded in 2014 by O.V. Brantley, Aleathia Chisholm, and Marva M. Swanson to preserve and promote African American quilting and other textile art.

Carolyn W. White conceptualized the design for this quilt in response to a challenge from the Brown Sugar Stitchers Quilt Guild: to honor the African American quilters who came before them. The multilayered way that she did this is reflected in the title of the piece, Awestruck before an Unforgettable Nubian Queen, or From Gee’s Bend to Royalty, which will be unpacked here.

“Awestruck” refers to Parker Curry, a young girl who visited the presidential portraits of Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama with her mother not long after they were unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in 2018. A photograph that another museum patron took of her looking up in “awe” of First Lady Obama went viral on the internet, turning Curry into a celebrity and leading to the release of a children’s book that she coauthored with her mother the following year.

“Unforgettable” refers to the 1951 song by Nat King Cole that his daughter Natalie rereleased as a duet in the 1990s. It symbolizes White’s veneration for intergenerational connections, between Curry and First Lady Michelle Obama as well as with her own intention to pay tribute to Black quilters who came before her. A small speaker inserted in the back of the quilt plays the song. White found a vendor who sells the kind of speakers that are used in greeting cards and sometimes contracts with them to be able to include a sound element in her quilts.

“Nubian Queen” refers to the majesty of First Lady Obama and the African royalty that White suggests she is descended from by including this row of embroidered queens on thrones who are further embellished with Swarovski crystals. This decorative band also replaces the gallery stanchion that protected the portrait from patrons like Curry when it was on view at the National Portrait Gallery, ostensibly removing the barrier between Curry and Obama and replacing it with a tribute to lineages of powerful Black woman.

Curry’s raincoat is also embroidered with the forty-four virtues that White associated with the forty-fourth president Barack Obama. Her hair is made from braided and poofed yarn adorned with cowrie shells, which along with the women in traditional African fabrics that White applied in her raincoat hood, are a tribute to her ancestry.

“From Gee’s Bend to Royalty” is a nod to Gee’s Bend quilters including Lucy. T. Pettway and Mary Lee Bendolph to whom White salutes by including printed patches of them on the back of the quilt. White had heard Amy Sherald, the artist who created First Lady Obama’s portrait, share about her choice of the dress that her subject wears. As Sherald put it, “It has an abstract pattern that reminded me of the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s geometric paintings. But [. . .] also resembles the inspired quilt masterpieces made by the women of Gee’s Bend.”

Sherald’s methodology as a painter often includes turning the skin tone of her Black subjects into gray scale to gesture to how the invention of photography allowed Black people to begin imaging themselves independently of the stereotyped ways they had been drawn and painted for centuries. White turned First Lady Michelle Obama’s skin back to brown to represent her admiration for the beauty of melanated skin.

Carolyn W. White (American, born 1950), Awestruck before an Unforgettable Nubian Queen, or From Gee’s Bend to Royalty, 2021, cotton, rayon, polyester, ink, fabric markers, acrylic, yarn, plastic beads, cowrie shells, and Swarovski crystals, 60 x 72 inches, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Friends of Folk Art, 2022.48. © Carolyn W. White.