Unravelling Tradition

Dear Yvonne Wells,

Your craft is as magnificent as it is untraditional. From the asymmetry to the crookedness, the patchwork of stories that you convey with only a needle and thread is symbolic to the complexity, struggle, comfort, and beauty that your creation of deviance has created. There is no need to appreciate, or rather there should be no appreciation, of such thing as a traditional quilt. In fact, tradition is nothing more than the prevalent story, or narrative, enforced throughout history and overlaying other narratives. It seems small and tight, unbreakable even. But it is nothing more than yet another fusion of needle and thread. Tradition can be unraveled into nothing but raw materials, and there we may start again, this time with a looser, more intricate and fluid construct.

Did you know that quilts originate in Egypt, Mongolia, and the Middle East long before the European Crusaders appropriated it as their own? Traditional quilts, therefore, are not at all traditional. Nothing is traditional really, or if it is, the very last thing it is is a creation of white culture. What you are doing through your works of untraditional quilts is more than telling stories, but rather representing the story of blacks' appropriation of this productive power for the purpose of resistance ( 270). It is only through this appropriation that what has been appropriated into brutal exploitation by the system that dares to call the quilt you make untraditional, when the needle and thread is fabricated with our very ancestors’ sweat and blood, may at last be retrieved. Then, and only then, will there be no such thing as tradition, as deviance, as “Otherness”.

There is no tradition, neutral, no convention to deviate from. There is only difference and unity, existing in a continual entanglement that makes up what we call art and society. Let us not appreciate traditional quilters. Let us all be artists and storytellers.

With love,

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham