Welcome to My 2nd Life
I lived my entire life – 69 years of it – wishing to do one thing but feeling obliged to do another.
All my life I have been in love with fabrics. My mother and older sisters sewed. My mother would sit at her sewing machine for hours, making clothing for herself and her six girls. Or making drapes and slipcovers for the family home. I remember going fabric shopping with her and my older sisters as we selected material for some special project or the other. I can recall the sights and feeling of going through the rows of bolts, each one holding another treasure to be explored, touched, unfolded, and inspected. How would it work, how would it look? Imagining the finished product was delightful. I can recall how I watched my mother operate the sewing machine and would ask her for scraps to fashion clothing for my dolls.
I also watched as my various siblings explored their artistic talents. It seemed everyone drew, sketched, painted, molded, or modeled something. My mother drew the dresses she planned to create, my sisters and older brother created landscapes. My younger brother drew tanks and airplanes with amazing accuracy. Living with art was like breathing; it was just part of the environment.
It wasn’t long before I was drawing and painting myself. In high school, I was able to major in art in my senior year. I was also fortunate enough to be chosen to participate in The Saturday Art League. The program was a joint venture between Temple University and the Philadelphia Public Schools. Various art teachers from the college taught high school seniors from across the city on Saturday mornings. At the end of the year, we had a group exhibition at the Philadelphia Civic Center. I learned a lot that year but I also got to see some outstanding young artists. I looked at their work and then I looked at mine. I didn’t think I was good enough to make a living as an artist and I didn’t want to teach art. So, I turned in a different direction.
In Real Life
After college, I went into the business world. I learned to operate in the financial markets and eventually settled into a long career in corporate executive search. Don’t get me wrong, I loved what I did. It turned out to be the perfect use for my right-brain meets left-brain work style. I was exposed to the inner workings, driving philosophies, and the varying corporate cultures in each new client business. Each new assignment gave me a new problem to solve. I got to meet people I might never have encountered otherwise. At the same time, it required a high degree of empathy for the needs and wants of the people on both sides of the deal. It was rewarding, challenging, and I was good at it; very good. However, I often found myself to be the only woman, and frequently, the only woman of color in many of those meetings.
In the meantime, I married – twice. Once at a young age and once as a so-called adult. Neither worked but each marriage blessed me with a phenomenal child. I juggled single motherhood and a high-demand career for 40 years loving my life but with quilts calling me.
Learning about the role of quilting in African American history and exposure to African prints happened at about the same time in my life – as a young adult. I began to think about how traditional quilts might look using African prints. Eventually, I made my first quilt 25 years ago and enjoyed the process and the result, but time was never on my side. My quilting efforts were relegated to occasional hobby status and mostly confined to baby quilts for friends.
My Second Life
At 67, I met and married the man of my dreams. Two days after our wedding, I began chemotherapy for endometrial cancer. He’d already asked me to retire and I had put him off. Cancer had another plan. The brain-fog that is a side effect of chemo left me unable to perform the high-wire act that was my job. So, retire I did. A year later, as I came out of the other end of my treatments, I picked up my quilting again. This time, it got my undivided attention. I had already learned my lesson about trying to follow traditional quilt patterns – just not my idea of fun! I still wanted to use my African prints, but I wanted to take them somewhere new. Images would pop in my head. Scenes from the ordinary would inspire me to rethink them in fabric, especially African fabrics. Turning these ideas into reality has become my Second Life.
The 144,000 (The Multitude) is one of the early quilts I completed in 2016. It uses a mix of African and other ethnic fabrics along with western cottons and recycled fabrics. On display at Catholic University for National Black Catholic’s Month 2021