From the floor of her home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the artist Yvonne Wells creates mind-bending quilts patched together with found objects, wonky shapes, and a look that Wells describes as being “different” from what the rest of the art world finds beautiful and trendy. Wells—who, despite growing up in a region known for its rich Black quilting history, did not make her first quilt until she was middle-aged in 1979—is a prolific, self-taught artist. Since the 1980s, she’s stunned critics with her quiet but impactful approach to quiltmaking—using her medium to tell Bible stories, or recount events from the Civil Rights Movement. And now, the artist is finally getting her due with back-to-back art shows, a 350-page book about her extraordinary work and life, and a fellowship prize from the Joan Mitchell Foundation.
“I just wish it could be spread out as opposed to all happening in the span of two months, but I’m dealing with it pretty good,” Wells tells me with a cheeky grin on a recent afternoon over Zoom. She has the jolly yet grounded energy of your favorite aunt—albeit one with an impeccable eye and a true artist’s heart. “But I’m excited. I never thought they would all come at one time.”
The monograph features text written by Dr. Stacy I. Morgan, a professor at U of A who spent over five years visiting Wells at her home for hours-long conversations, which will be included in the book. “I never have experienced anything like it before,” Wells recalls. “I never thought I could write, but he said, ‘You are writing because you’re telling me everything to say.’” The artist describes the process as “long and fierce, but good. I learned a lot from him, because I’m not a person familiar with the art world, nor am I familiar with quilts, until I started to make ‘em. I didn’t know this much was said about a quilt!”
Wells developed a love for all things “irregular,” as she puts it, early on. “That’s why most of my quilts are irregular—and I don’t want to straighten ‘em up. I can have a raggedy piece, and I can make that piece fit, whereas the traditional quilter wouldn’t even bother with it. But I make it talk.”
That same artistic process applies to the works that’ll be on view at Fort Gansevoort, the Paul R. Jones museum, and in the book. It’s led her to make “over a thousand quilts” during the span of her career, she estimates. She keeps the lot of them “upstairs, in my quilt cave,” which Fort Gansevoort reps visited a couple of years ago to photograph each piece they wanted to include in the upcoming exhibition.
“My work has been called a lot of things: ‘that junk.’ ‘I wouldn’t show this to anybody.’ All that kind of thing,” Wells adds. “But this has been the greatest thing that’s happened to me. I don’t want to stop. I want to continue to make quilts with stories so that the younger generation can look and see. If it’s an inspiration to them, it’s definitely worth it.”
