At a glance, quilting is an intricate, but ultimately utilitarian craft that largely exists in the domestic sphere. But the truth is, quilters have always embedded stories, and sometimes political meaning, into their creations through various styles of stitching and textile. This is especially true of racialized quilters, including the 19th-century Black feminists who used quilting as an act of defiance.

Today, a new generation of artists—including Bisa Butler, Bhasha Chakrabarti and Sanford Biggers—are taking the art of quilting back to where it began, and using it to translate political and familial messages.

Butler, for instance, is a New Jersey–based artist known for her vibrant quilt portraits celebrating Black life, which feature everyone from Harriet Tubman to Questlove and hang in permanent collections at various American museums, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

“Quilts are tombs of history,” Butler said in a May 2024 interview with Print Mag. “Printed fabrics give you a date and time. If I’m using oranges and blues and day-glow flowers made of polyester, you know that fabric is from the 1970s because they’re not making fabric like that anymore. So by me using my grandmother’s fabrics that she wore in the 1960s and the late 1950s, you recognize the time; when was this made, how did this person live that they had access to lace or velvet or day-glow flowers.”

Like Butler, who was inspired by her mother and grandmother’s love of the art, Toronto artist Justin Ming Yong would see his mother quilting daily. But he was never interested in trying it himself. Like many others, he used to associate quilting with images of old women gathered in church basements.

In fact, it wasn’t until the pandemic brought the world to a standstill in 2020 that he reached out to her to learn more about quilting. A photographer by trade, his work instantly dried up when governments began implementing lockdowns, so he suddenly had a lot of time on his hands. Besides, he’d been feeling burnt out and found himself craving a meditative pastime.

“With social media being so image-based…you’re just getting images thrown at you non-stop,” he says. “I felt like I had nothing to say with photography…It sort of lost meaning. Quilting was more hands-on.”

Like Butler and her contemporaries, Yong joins a lineage of pioneering artists, including Joyce Wieland, who questioned the categorization of quilting as not much more than folk art or “women’s work.” Or Myla Borden, who started quilting in 1993 and went on to make picture quilts depicting the journey of Africans from the continent through the slavery era in the U.S. to freedom in the northern free states and Canada. Or even Doris Lazore, a Mohawk quilter who incorporates beadwork and other Indigenous traditions into her quilting.

In 1971, Wieland showcased a quilt titled La raison avant la passion (Reason over Passion), along with other fabric-based and stitched artworks, at the National Gallery of Canada as part of her exhibition True Patriot Love. In his review of the show at the time, Ottawa Citizen reporter Tom Rossiter described it as “Joyce the housewife filling the gallery with pillows and quilts.” It was a dismissive comment about a thoughtful work—Wieland was quoting a then newly elected prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who had famously said, “Reason over passion—that is the theme of all my writing.” Her quilt featured those words in bold lettering, surrounded by hearts.

“Reason over Passion is normally encountered hanging on the wall of a museum, but we can imagine what the words might connote if the quilt was draped over a bed,” notes Johanne Sloan, professor of art history at Concordia University, in the 2016 online art book Joyce Wieland: Life & Work. “With this piece, Wieland creates the conditions under which the political meets the personal.”

Not every artist sees their work as explicitly political, of course. While many of his quilts are functional, Yong primarily sees them as “hangings,” although he acknowledges they can carry that additional layer of meaning, depending on how the viewer sees his work. He is aware of the rich history of patterns and symbols used in the craft, as well as age-old stories of quilts hanging on a clothesline or the windowsills of safehouses along the Underground Railroad, but calls his own process more impromptu.

For instance, he’s been modifying and altering his fabric patches with processes like dyeing and colour removal.

But even in cases where artists are most interested in experimenting with form, history sneaks in. It’s not clear whether the legendary stories of secret codes being used to fashion Underground Railroad quilts are true, for example, but the idea of those patterns has inspired the contemporary Black quilters of Nova Scotia, says David Woods, a multidisciplinary artist, curator and organizing founder of the Black Artists Network of Nova Scotia (BANNS).

The use of patterns such as Drunkard’s Path (a zigzag route one would use to confuse dogs on the scent and slave catchers) or Log Cabin (a way to locate a safe house) by artists such as Borden or Winnipeg-based Melinda Clayton-Patterson in their works today is a deliberate act of asserting a cultural identity, even if not an expressly political act, Woods adds.

Woods’s own interest in quilting began while sourcing works for an exhibition of African Nova Scotian art in 1998. He’d been looking for paintings, photographs or woodworks when quiltmaker Alfreda Smith informed him that “making quilts is what Black women did.”

He was shocked when he went on to view more than 100 quilts over a two-month research period; the oldest was sewn in 1880. They were utilitarian and beautiful objects, often made by Black women as a matter of course, while raising their children and grandchildren; popular patterns included log cabins, flying geese and the Texas Lone Star. Given as gifts, they were to be treasured and carried on from generation to generation.

“It was woven into the fabric of life, it was a part of being,” says Woods.

Inevitably, aspects of Black history and culture were also stitched in. The strip quilt pattern dominated in East Preston, near Halifax—perhaps because this style didn’t require specific types and colours of fabric, making it cheaper and easier for the many large families in the region who handled the craft and split resources. But this style was also a “continuation of the Kente cloth fabric patterns of West African countries, and is one of the contributions to the North American quilt-making aesthetic that came directly from the African continent,” Woods notes in an as-yet unpublished essay.

In his Toronto studio, Yong eyes his lobster quilt, which features the red crustacean on a white background, and brings together his identities as a Chinese Canadian artist. While the crustacean is an everyday food for the Newfoundland side of his family, it represents a special meal for his Chinese side, he explains. The image-centric lobster quilt was a departure from his abstract pieces, but even in those quilts, he finds ways to incorporate aspects of Chinese traditions that fascinate him, such as using the Chinese silk tapestry called Kesi, which involves weaving in a pictorial design.

Like those quilters who came far before him, Yong is using techniques passed down through generations to embed messages of justice and images of heritage. “I am trying to push the medium as far as I can—really the boundaries of what a quilt is, trying to dissect it and then put my own spin on it,” he says.