Robin Joyce Miller discovered her twin passions — quilts and collaging — out of necessity.

“I came to collage through my students,” says Miller, who was a special education teacher in New York City in the 1980s and ’90s. “My students had a hard time retaining facts and information from history books.”

She started summarizing social studies texts and having her students create drawings. Later, she began making cut-paper scenes with her students on bulletin boards to illustrate historical events and discovered how much she herself enjoyed the process.

Outside the classroom, she started sketching out large-scale compositions, then using the drawing as a guide, outlining shapes with tracing paper and cutting them out on patterned paper. “Sort of like appliqué,” she explains. “It’s not a quilt, but it’s not your typical collage either; it’s a mixed-media form I kind of created myself.”

Sixteen of Miller’s mixed-media collage-quilts are on view at Wellfleet Preservation Hall through Jan. 28. Titled “African American Quilt Collection,” the exhibit is presented by ArtPeace Makers, a local organization that promotes artmaking and peace building. Miller will give a talk, “A Sankofa Journey: The African in America” on Friday, Jan. 16 from 4 to 6 p.m.

As with her collage technique, Miller came upon the rich history of quilts through her work. After 15 years teaching special education, she took a year-long sabbatical to study art and returned as an art teacher in 1998.

“In my first year as an art teacher, I was searching for a project to do for Black History Month,” she says. “I had a book called Talking to Faith Ringgold. In that book, she mentions that jazz was a real contribution that men gave to America, and quiltmaking, women. So, I decided that to honor African American history, I would have my kids create jazz quilts.”

It was not until she took her sabbatical that Miller learned that jazz had originated in the Black community. “For years I did not know that African Americans created jazz,” she says. “I knew the names of jazz musicians and that we played jazz, but why would I think that we created it? Because America doesn’t tell us that we created anything.”

Ringgold, a quiltmaker, painter, writer, and activist, became a mentor of Miller’s. Born in Harlem in 1930, Ringgold spent her seven-decade career in relentless pursuit of justice and beauty. The influence of her energetic compositions saturated with rich storytelling is evident in Miller’s collages. Tar Beach, a children’s book written and illustrated by Ringgold that draws on the conventions of quiltmaking, is particularly pertinent to Miller’s life and work.

Miller began making her own responses to African American history. “I started doing quilt after quilt of history” — inspired by the Middle Passage, the Civil Rights Movement, the Million-Man March. “I was making my own collection of history,” she says.

Most of the mixed-media collages on view are “history quilts,” created while Miller was still teaching in New York City. She retired in 2012 and now lives in Barnstable. The history quilts also make up the core of Miller’s 2017 book, The Faithful Journey: From Slavery to Presidency, co-authored with her husband, James W. Miller.

Miller’s desire to memorialize African American history is reflected in the materials she works with. In Gee’s Bend Quilt she honors the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Ala. — an isolated, poor community in which most residents are descendants of enslaved people who worked the cotton plantation established in 1816 by Joseph Gee. In the collage-quilt, Miller created a thick border framing vignettes of rural life. A list of names (Pettway, Williams, Young) encircles these scenes, and the words “Gee’s Bend Alabama” bisect the collage. Known for their lively, graphic patterns, Gee’s Bend quilts were typically stitched together from old clothes and used for warmth and comfort. These quilts gained art-world fame after a 2002 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston that later traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Harriet Powers Quilt is a quilt-within-a-quilt. A tapestry of uneven rectangles contains blocky figures both human and animal. The gold, brown, and blue shapes unfold across a velvety black sky. To the left of the meta-quilt, a woman stands in a structure the color of a robin’s egg. It’s marked with a red cross, and a crescent moon presides above in the starry sky.

All of Miller’s work required extensive research. For this quilt, she studied the life of folk artist and quilter Harriet Powers. Once immersed in the history that informs a given quilt, Miller begins planning the visual composition. “After I plan the drawing on paper — where everything is going to be — I start taking out decorative paper and putting together patterns and prints,” she says. “Maybe I’ll pick two prints, and I’ll work around the colors in those prints.”

The two later works on view at Wellfleet Preservation Hall — Negro, an illustration of Langston Hughes’s poem of the same name, and Harriet Powers — show Miller’s artistic evolution, integrating a wider variety of materials and evolving into three-dimensional objects rather than two-dimensional compositions.

Miller says that the subjects of her quilt-collages are deeply personal. “When I was five years old,” she says, “an older cousin said to me, ‘Robin, I want you to know that our family comes from African people.’ I ran around the house screaming, ‘I’m not African, I’m not African!’ I had seen Africans in cartoons, and I could not relate to any of these representations. It was all negative; it was all buffoonery.”

She remembers carrying this inner pain from that point onward, although her parents never knew. “It was not something that was ever talked about,” she says. “I always felt that white people were ‘regular people,’ so we must be irregular. We’re something less-than.”

Miller’s work continued to evolve as her research expanded. Trips to South Africa, Swaziland, and Ghana profoundly influenced her art. Journey to Hell was born of the knowledge, gleaned from a trip to Ghana, that enslaved people were forced to walk in chains for three to four months to get to the dungeons along the coast.

Miller recently completed another book, titled My Sankofa Journey: An African American Story. She is also working on a film, Sankofa: An Enslavement Story, and giving talks across the Cape related to the book and movie.

“Sankofa is an Adinkra symbol, usually represented by a bird,” Miller says. Adinkra is a writing system of symbols used by the Akan peoples of Ghana. She gestures to an Adinkra symbol centrally placed in her living room that is integrated into much of her current work.

“A Sankofa bird has an elongated neck,” says Miller. “She bends back with the egg of the future in her mouth. She’s telling us, ‘You must go back to your roots to better navigate the future.’ ”

The Egg of the Future

The event: African American history quilts by Robin Joyce Miller
The time: Through Jan. 28; artist talk and reception, Friday, Jan. 16, 4 to 6 p.m.
The place: Wellfleet Preservation Hall, 335 Main St.
The cost: Free