It has been amazing to have quilts from my collection share space with the work of Ramekon O’Arwisters. I really enjoyed the Zoom conversation we had with Elaine Y. Yau. Even as exhibitions and galleries have to contend with these strange times, it is exciting to be able to share these works virtually across the world. It’s been equally exciting sharing the tactility and beauty of these quilts in person, when I’ve been able to get to the gallery to walk friends and admirers through the exhibition.
You can see more of American Quilts via the Patricia Sweetow Gallery and more work by Ramekon O’Arwisters here.
From the Collection of Roderick Kiracofe: American Quilts Below the Radar, 1950-2000
Ramekon O’Arwisters: Flowered Thorns
September 11 – October 23, 2021
From Patricia Sweetow Gallery
On Thursday, September 9th at 4pm, Elaine Y. Yau, Associate Curator at BAMPFA, led a virtual Zoom conversation with artist Ramekon O’Arwisters & collector Roderick Kiracofe. Elaine Y. Yau is Associate Curator of the Eli Leon Living Trust Collection of African American Quilts at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), where she is organizing an exhibition from Leon’s historic bequest of approximately 3,000 quilts. She co-curated Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective in 2020 with Larry Rinder, an exhibition deepened her long-standing engagement with art at the intersections of craft, vernacular culture, and modernism. She has published on artists such as Gertrude Morgan and Minnie Evans, and her critical essay on folk art was included in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History in 2019. Her research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
About Ramekon O’Arwisters
Ramekon O’Arwisters is the 2021 recipient of the McLaughlin Award for The Project Space at The Headlands Center for the Arts, Artist-in-Residence program. In addition he received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for 2020/21. Past artist-in-residence programs include the de Young Museum Artist in Residence, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Recology San Francisco Artists-in-Residence Program and the Vermont Studio Center. Grants and Awards include Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, NY, the San Francisco Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Program, Black Artists Fund, Sacramento, and the Eureka Fellow awarded by the Fleishhacker Foundation in San Francisco. His work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine, the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, 7×7 Magazine, Artnet, and the San Francisco Examiner. Born in Kernersville, North Carolina, O’Arwisters earned a M.Div. from Duke University Divinity School in 1986. O’Arwisters is the founder of Crochet Jam, a community arts project infused with folk-art traditions that foster a creative culture in cooperative relationships.