NEW YORK, NY.- Claire Oliver Gallery is presenting We're Still Here: Quilted Works Curated by Carolyn Mazloomi, an exhibition that surveys quilted works curated by renowned quilt-maker, historian, and curator Carolyn Mazloomi. On view November 13, 2026 - January 7, 2027, the exhibition brings together the work of fifteen quilt artists Alita Aldridge, Lauren Austin, Gwendolyn Aqui Brooks, Donna Chambers, Carolyn Crump, Renee Fleuranges-Valdes, L'Merchie Frazier, Myrah Brown Green, Sylvia Hernandez, Viola Burley Leak, Cynthia Lockhart, Ed Johnetta Miller, Rosy Petri, Josie Love Roebuck, and April Anue Shipp, each offering a distinct visual voice within the shared language of textile and quilted art. Under Mazloomi's curation, the show surveys the 40 year arc of the Women of Color Quilter's Network, which she founded in 1985. Each artist brings a unique approach to material, pattern, and narrative, positioning quilting as both a historical craft and a vital contemporary art form.
"All of the work I make and the work of my fellow quilters deals with Black history and material culture," states Mazloomi. "This exhibition is our way of saying that our history cannot be erased, by any politician or revisionist force, our work will always showcase our triumphs, suffering, creativity, courage, bravery and genius of my people. Black history is American History."
April Anue Shipp, The Oracle of Liberation, cotton and vinyl; appliqué, machine quilted, 2025, 41 x 38 x inches | 104 x 97 x cm
We're Still Here continues Claire Oliver Gallery's ongoing commitment to championing artists working in fiber and textile-based media, and to expanding the critical and commercial visibility of quilting within the contemporary art world.
Carolyn Mazloomi founded the Women of Color Quilters Network (WCQN), after placing an advertisement in Quilter's Newsletter Magazine seeking correspondence with other Black quilters who shared her frustration at working in isolation. The response led to a small founding circle, including Mazloomi, Claire E. Carter, and aRma Carter, that grew into a national non-profit organization whose mission is to educate, preserve, exhibit, promote, and document quilts made by African Americans. At its peak, WCQN had as many as 1,700 members nationwide. A trained aerospace engineer who had previously founded the African American Quilt Guild of Los Angeles in 1981, Mazloomi has spent four decades bringing the unrecognized contributions of Black quilt artists to museums, scholars, and the public, curating dozens of exhibitions and authoring multiple books on the subject. In 2014, she was named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts, the nation's highest honor for traditional and folk arts.
THE ARTISTS
Dr. Myrah Brown Green (Brooklyn, NY) is a self-taught quiltmaker, educator, curator, and art historian with a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies. Over more than three decades, she has developed a symbolist practice drawing on African and African diasporic imagery, cowry shells, and figures rendered without distinguishing features to explore the lived experience of Black women. Her quilts are held in the collections of the Smithsonian's Anacostia Community Museum and Michigan State University, and she is the author of Brooklyn on My Mind: Black Artists from the WPA to the Present.
Gwendolyn Aqui-Brooks (Washington, DC) is a native Washingtonian trained in painting at Howard University's College of Fine Arts, working as a mixed-media artist, quilter, and doll designer for more than four decades. Her vividly hand-sewn quilts merge patchwork, geometric abstraction, and narrative, often drawing on her travels through Brazil, Turkey, West Africa, and the Caribbean. Her work is held in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Carolyn Crump (Houston, TX) was born in Detroit and trained in advertising design at Cranbrook Academy of Art. She is known internationally for sculptural, three-dimensional quilts, sewn as canvases that tell stories of African American culture and history. Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Michigan State University's African American Quilt Collection.
Renée Fleuranges-Valdes (North Charleston, SC), a retired IBM software executive turned fine art quilter, discovered quilting in 1999 and has since built a practice defined by intricate, representational portrait quilts and an innovative four-layer, free-motion quilting technique. Since retiring in 2019, she has become known for work depicting joy, movement, and the multicultural identity she brings to the medium. Renée's work shows in museums and exhibits internationally, and is in the permanent collections of the Spencer Museum of Art of Kansas University and the York W. Bailey Museum at the Penn Center, St Helena Island, South Carolina.
Viola Burley Leak (Washington, DC) has worked in painting, printmaking, and textiles for more than five decades. She holds degrees from Fisk University, Pratt Institute, Hunter College, and Howard University, and studied with Aaron Douglas, Romare Bearden, and Charles White. Her narrative, religiously inflected quilts have appeared in more than one hundred exhibitions, with work held in the collections of the United Nations and the New York State Office Building, among others.
Cynthia Lockhart (Cincinnati, OH) is professor emerita at the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning, where she taught fiber art and accessory design for twenty-five years. Drawing on her background in fashion design, Lockhart creates sculptural, three-dimensional textile works influenced by her African ancestry. Her quilt Created To Be Me was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of the Renwick Gallery's 50th anniversary campaign.
Ed Johnetta Miller, A Gathering of Cultures: A Joyful Connection embroidery, cotton, repurposed fabric, 2026, 57 x 55 x inches | 145 x 140 x cm
Ed Johnetta Miller (Hartford, CT) worked as a weaver for more than three decades before turning to improvisational quiltmaking at the encouragement of Carolyn Mazloomi, cutting apart woven cloth to build vivid, jazz-inflected compositions. Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, and has twice been featured in The New York Times.
April Anue Shipp (Rochester Hills, MI), a Detroit native, is best known for Strange Fruit, a monumental quilt that took three years to complete, inscribing the names of nearly five thousand documented victims of lynching in the United States between 1865 and 1965. Her work has been exhibited at Detroit's Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History and elsewhere.
Rosy Petri (Milwaukee, WI) is a self-taught, multidisciplinary artist working in fabric portraiture, printmaking, and storytelling, using African wax prints and repurposed textiles to create contemporary iconography rooted in Black history and culture. A Mary L. Nohl Fellow and the inaugural Artist in Residence at the bell hooks Center at Berea College, her work is held in the collections of the Pfister Hotel and the James Museum.
Alita Aldridge, Underground Takes A Village
Alita Aldridge is a Los Angeles native from a family of makers; her mother, an accomplished dressmaker, taught her to sew. After several decades of working and raising her daughters, she was inspired by art quilts roughly ten years ago and began quilting. Her work has earned first- and second-place honors at regional quilt shows and has been juried into Road to California and the Atlanta Quilt Festival. A quilt of hers is part of the permanent collection of the James Museum's traveling exhibition Black Pioneers: Legacy in the American West.
Lauren Austin (Maitland, FL), born in Boston, began quilting with her family at age seven. She worked as a U.S. foreign service officer, computer consultant, and human rights lawyer before an invitation from Carolyn Mazloomi to contribute to Threads of Faith led her to quilt full-time in 2004. Honoring ancestors, family, and Black history, including Florida's, she draws on family photographs and works in hand dyeing, appliqué, beading, and cyanotype. Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery, the James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art, and the International Quilt Museum.
Donna Chambers is a quilt artist, teacher, and curator whose narrative quilts explore African American history, cultural memory, spirituality, and community storytelling. Taught to sew by her mother, she combines portraiture, symbolism, appliqué, and bold textile design. She has taught workshops, exhibited nationally and led quilting guilds over several decades. Her work is held in the permanent collection of the International Quilt Museum, in Lincoln, NE.
L'Merchie Frazier, Climate Change In My Head
L'Merchie Frazier (Boston, MA) is a visual activist, fiber and public artist, historian, and poet, and the Executive Director of SPOKE Art. Her work in textiles, beadwork, metalwork, poetry, and performance draws on five hundred years of Black and Indigenous history in support of reparative justice and civil and human rights. She is a former Director of Education and Interpretation at the Museum of African American History, a Boston Foundation Brother Thomas Fellow, and a mayoral appointee to Boston's Reparations Task Force. Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Museum of Arts and Design.
Sylvia Hernández (Brooklyn, NY), born on the Lower East Side and raised in Williamsburg, is a self-taught master quilter who found her way to fabric through illustration, which she explored at the High School of Art & Design. Her handcrafted quilts address community and human rights issues, and she is a teaching artist at El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice. She is a former president of Quilters of Color of NYC. Her quilts are held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the James Museum, the Clinton Presidential Center, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Josie Love Roebuck, born in 1995, combines drawing, painting, and textiles to make layered, narrative works about being biracial and adopted by a white family. Using screenprint ink, acrylic, upcycled fabric, yarn, and cut-wood forms, she describes her process as quilting two perspectives together. She holds a BFA from the University of Georgia's Lamar Dodd School of Art and an MFA from the University of Cincinnati, where she received the DAAP Outstanding MFA Student Award in 2021. She has exhibited with LatchKey Gallery and Kavi Gupta.
