Writer and curator Austen Villacis explores the power of quilting as an artistic expression, a form of commemoration, and a way of recovering missing stories from the past.
Over the summer, I had the chance to visit This Land Is… at the Huntington and Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles at the Autry. Because the history of Los Angeles – and our country writ large – survives so unevenly, decisions about what to include and exclude shape ideas of what is worthy of preservation, display, and remembrance. They inform how we understand ourselves and our histories. Where mere inclusion cannot answer these questions, museum interpretation often attempts to.
I was interested in the roles of quilts and narrative textiles in these exhibitions, as well as one from my home institution, the La Puente Valley Historical Society, and what they reveal about the nation’s founding. Quilting, a key element of American visual culture and women’s history in the U.S., has historically been a method by which women could communicate histories of themselves and their communities. Women, especially those in rural settings, embedded historical knowledge and artistic innovation in textiles that also served practical functions.
The three textiles differ radically in their narrative strategies, formal construction, and overall cadence: two come from the Autry and Huntington exhibitions, while the third is a quilt made by members of the La Puente community for the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976. What connects them is their ability to convey lived experiences that exist beyond mainstream understandings of the U.S., Laos, and Los Angeles.
Mary Lee Bendolph, Image of Formal Presidents, 2009. Cotton, 81 × 73 in. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
At The Huntington, This Land Is… explores the nation’s history leading up to and after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The only quilt on view, Mary Bendolph’s Image of Formal Presidents (2009), was intended as a gift to the former President and First Lady. The Obamas ultimately received a different quilt, and this one is now part of The Huntington’s collections.
Bendolph is an artist in a collective of quilters in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, who often made quilts from reused or everyday fabrics. In Image of Formal Presidents, a fabric printed with images of former presidents frames the bold patterns and irregular style that often earned Bendolph and other Gee’s Bend quilters comparisons to 20th-century modernist abstraction, minimalism, and Color Field painting. The tradition developed primarily among descendants of people enslaved on the former Gee and Pettway plantations, many of whose families remained on the same land after emancipation as tenant farmers and sharecroppers.
Gee’s Bend’s outsized visibility and overwhelming popularity have consequently made it a mainstay of museum collections and exhibitions featuring Black craft. An unintended consequence of their fame is that it places an impossible representational burden on an object rooted in highly specific communities and histories. The problem is not the quilts themselves, but what happens when a tradition shaped in part by enslavement, segregation, and economic isolation is repeatedly made an exemplar of Black making writ large. Doing so risks collapsing a far broader history of Black cultural production – including traditions of extraordinary technical precision, refinement, and specialized skill – into an aesthetic whose celebrated “improvisation” was inseparable from particular historical conditions.
Through the inclusion of this specific work, one in which Bendolph asks to be understood through her decision to commemorate the inauguration of the nation’s first Black president, The Huntington provides an alternative perspective on Gee’s Bend, one which centers the artist’s contemporary intentions.
See Lee, Hmong Story Cloth, circa 1980. Cotton. The Autry Museum of the American West. Image courtesy author.
Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles at the Autry includes a Hmong story cloth by See Lee that chronicles her family’s escape from Laos during the Vietnam War.
Although Laos was formally neutral in the Vietnam War, it became the site of a U.S. covert war that included support for Hmong forces and an extensive American bombing campaign. Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Laos, in part to disrupt North Vietnamese supply routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Ho Chi Minh Trail served as the primary supply route from communist North Vietnam to forces fighting in South Vietnam (passing through Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). Because Lee’s family had supported the U.S.-backed royal government and were no longer safe under the new government, they escaped across the Mekong River in 1975 to Thailand, spending an unspecified amount of time there before resettling in Long Beach, California.
The story cloth depicts their episodic journey. The formal techniques are characteristic of many Hmong story cloths: spectacular color contrasts, dense embroidery, linear narrative storytelling, and repeated symbols including mountains, rivers, soldiers, families, and animals. Lee’s figures leave the mountainous regions of Laos and make their way to and through the Mekong River along the shared border with Thailand. Some travel by boats, others enter the water, and eventually they appear in refugee camps in Thailand, splitting the textile into two zones. From there, they board buses and planes to the United States and then (ostensibly) to Long Beach.
Story cloths shift traditional Hmong paj ntaub embroidery from ornament and pattern to narrative. Embroidery doesn’t merely embellish in Hmong story cloths; it tells the story. In Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles, See Lee’s work is among the only acknowledgments of Southeast Asian heritage and migration paths. East Asian experiences such as Chinese- and Japanese-American stories are gaining broader recognition in local, state, and national histories, including these two exhibitions. Within an exhibition organized around the nation’s founding principles, Lee’s account complicates the association of the United States with refuge and liberty. Her family’s arrival in California belongs to a history that also indicts America for its role in stoking conflict overseas.
The La Puente Valley Bicentennial Quilt, 1976. Cotton. Image courtesy the La Puente Valley Historical Society, photography by Yubo Dong.
Finally, I see the Bicentennial Quilt (1976) in conversation with the Image of Formal Presidents and Hmong Story Cloth. This quilt, in contrast to the first two, can be attributed to at least 32 local women instead of a single artist. There was no machine sewing; needleworkers were instructed to hand-stitch all elements of their block. Final assembly and finishing were also hand-stitched, including quilting and the calligraphy which adorns the bottom of each block and the back (in the form of a signature of the name of the woman who stitched it). The quilt is documented in detail in a small booklet published by the La Puente Valley Historical Society in 1976.
The artists chose to mark La Puente’s history in the context of the nation’s history free from the sort of romanticism characteristic of Bicentennial Revival quilts of this period, which tended to utilize stars, stripes, flags, eagles, historical figures, state symbols, maps, monuments, and other colonial-era motifs. The women of La Puente, while they avoided outward nationalist symbols, still participated in a larger national narrative of progress and incorporation, which tells the story of La Puente from pre-Conquest Native Peoples (Gabrieleno Indians, Native Birds, Land Grant of Rancho La Puente patches) to modernity under U.S. statehood (First Puente School, First Post Office, and First Railroad Station patches). It’s subtle: while the women are using their own visual language, the narrative implies that Americanization is the natural endpoint of La Puente’s history. Their quilt also calls attention to the fact that underrepresentation can also be geographic. Many smaller cities and towns surrounding Los Angeles remain marginal to the stories mainstream institutions tell, despite having their own dense histories of migration, labor, development, civic life, and artistic production.
These three textiles engage national history in different ways: Bendolph’s commemoration of a presidential inauguration enters a museum’s account of American history; Lee records a family’s displacement in the aftermath of war; and the La Puente quilt places a local community within a larger narrative of national development. Together, they reveal how women artists have expanded the public record while also participating in, and sometimes unsettling, the stories through which the nation understands itself. They also illustrate what we have to lose if we don’t carry these living traditions into the 21st century.
This tradition has not disappeared. The Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian is hosting a quilt-along for the nation’s 250th anniversary, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston has launched a Quilters in Residence program, and recently, activists unfurled a 24-foot-long Stolen Neighbors Quilt at the Minnesota State Capitol, its 11,000 volunteer-stitched patches representing people organizers describe as disappeared by ICE in the state. The concern is less for quilting itself surviving as an artistic practice – it will – and more whether these objects will be documented, preserved, and understood as history. I hope they will be.
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Austen Villacis is an independent curator and writer based in Los Angeles. He holds an M.A. in Curatorial Practices from the University of Southern California, where he researched American quilting histories and exhibition histories of folk and outsider art. He recently received an American Quilt Study Group Fellowship and serves on the board of the La Puente Valley Historical Society.
Posted in October 2026.