Long before Richmond Open Studies started raising the profile of the city’s visual arts scene, Eli Leon knew there was a rich vein of creative expression here hiding in plain sight.

The Oakland-based collector, who was focused on commissioning and acquiring quilts made by Black women, eventually procured nearly 3,000 pieces that were donated after his death to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives (BAMPFA). Many of Leon’s most arresting quilts were made by Richmond residents, including the well-known Rosie Lee Tompkins, whose brilliant, improvisation-inspired work was featured in an internationally acclaimed but pandemic-limited 2020-21 BAMPFA retrospective.

Several of Tompkins quilts are part of BAMPFA’s current exhibition “Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California,” which opened in June and runs through Nov. 30. But she was far from the only Richmond quilt-maker unearthed by Leon. His treasure trove includes striking Richmond-made pieces by Zula Mae Johnson, Louella Harris, Mable Battle and Selena Foster (who are no longer living) and Sherry Byrd, “who’s still alive, but moved back to Fairfield, Texas,” said Elaine Yau, associate curator of BAMPFA’s African American quilt collection. 

“She was a late-comer who moved to Richmond with her husband, a junk hauler, in 1977. They lived in the Easter Hill Village projects for 20 years, where she home schooled six kids and used quilt-making as the basis of her art curriculum.”

That’s not the usual way the art form has been passed down from grandmothers, moms, and aunts to their female kin. The exhibit shows how quilt making was a way for the community’s culture to survive over time,  starting with the Great Migration, which saw millions of Black people leave the South for points west and north between 1910 through 1970.

Famously, Richmond was a particular destination during World War II, when thousands were drawn from Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma by plentiful jobs in the Kaiser Shipyards. In Byrd’s case, she learned quilt making “at the knee of her grandmother, Gladys Henry, who also has a piece in the collection,” Yau said.

Byrd entered Leon’s orbit when she answered his classified ad declaring that he was looking to buy quilts. She responded “and he ended up buying about 40 quilts from her, and a dozen from her daughter, Bara Byrd-Stewart,” Yau said. “When Eli Leon received a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue his work on African American quilting he purchased an RV and went to Fairfield, connecting with Sherry’s mother Laverne Bracken,” whose work is also included in “Routed West.”

“The fact you have a very quirky collector type in the Bay Area who had a taste for the funky and off beat, living in North Oakland and Berkeley, mixing with this Black migrant culture is a very Bay Area story,” Yau said. “A decade or two down the line, the way he connected with Larry Rinder at BAM and how the quilts even came to Berkeley, there’s a chain of unique connections.”

No one did more to put Richmond on the art world’s map than Rosie Lee Tompkins, the pseudonym of Arkansas-born Effie Mae Martin Howard (1936–2006). In many ways her relationship with Leon, who died in 2018 at 82, embodies that fascinating dynamic unleashed by Leon’s collecting, which created a market for folk art treasured within families.

“Growing up, we didn’t have any quilts on our beds,” because she hadn’t started making them yet, said Sammy Howard, born to Tompkins when she was 17, followed by four more children. Now living in Reno, he was raised in Richmond and shared with Richmondside what their life was like. 

A striving middle class family —  Tompkins’ husband worked for the East Bay water district —Tompkins was active in the community as a Girl Scout leader and was the founder of the Parchester Panthers youth group.

East Bay quilt collector Eli Leon befriended Richmond quilter Effie Mae Martin Howard, a deeply spiritual and private woman, and suggested she sign her work as “Rosie Lee Tompkins.” — Photo courtesy of BAMPFA

She was an avid sewer who made pillow covers to earn extra money before she met Leon at a Marin flea market in 1985 and struck up an unlikely friendship. Impressed by her work, he encouraged her to focus on quilting, and according to Howard he suggested the moniker Rosie Lee Tompkins.

“Eli said ‘I can make you famous,’ and she said ‘no, no,’ ” Howard recalled. “She never wanted to be famous. She was very spiritual and deeply private. She knew she was gifted. She didn’t do any of that quilting bee stuff. She’d be in the house. If she didn’t have company it didn’t bother her.”

Leon had started organizing exhibitions of African American quilts in the 1980s, and it was a show focusing on black-and-white pieces at the Richmond Art Center in 1996 that drew the attention of Larry Rinder, who was the Berkeley Art Museum’s director and chief curator. Leon assured him that he’d be dazzled by her work in color, and the two men forged a consequential alliance. Tompkins threw herself into quilting, and her output was so prodigious that Howard was shocked when he walked through the BAMPFA retrospective.

“I didn’t appreciate how creative she was at that time,” Howard said. “I hadn’t seen some of that stuff for more than 40 years. I didn’t know she made that many. But I can’t tell you how many sewing machines I bought. I had the key to the house and I’d come in and hear that sewing machine going. I’d take her to Jo-Ann Fabric and the Salvation Army. She knew what she was looking for. The materials she wanted to use were already in her head. It started long before she walked in the store.”

“Routed West” is pushing against the prevailing winds from Washington, D.C. The Trump Administration terminated two grants that the museum had secured to preserve the African American Quilt Collection and support the exhibition. The loss of more than $260,000 has set back ongoing work to maintain the collection, but “Routed West,” a glorious explosion of colors, rhythmic patterns and playful creativity, went on as scheduled.

Richmond remains home to thriving quilt community

Meanwhile, Richmond continues to nurture a thriving community of quilters. Deborah Butler has lived in the city for half a century and belongs to the African American Quilt Guild of Oakland. A life-long crafter, she’s a veteran seamstress and cake decorator who learned to sew from her mother, “but my grandmother Mattie McCoy introduced me to hand quilting,” she said.

“When we were young everybody got a quilt from grandma. I still have her quilt on my bed.”

Butler, 71, made choir robes, suits and dresses before turning to quilting as a form of creative expression relatively late. She started using designs from magazines, but her cousin Ernestine Simington “encouraged me to design my own patterns,” Butler recalled. “She said, ‘Whatever you sew, make it your own.’” It was a message she took to heart, winning a 2024 Artistic Achievement Award from the Richmond Art Center’s Art of the African Diaspora exhibition.

She’s found a welcoming community in the African American Quilt Guild of Oakland, but there’s a lively quilting scene in Richmond, where seamstresses can be found perusing fabrics and getting tips at Bay Quilts.

 “We used to have Jo-Ann too, but I love Bay Quilts,” Butler said. “I go and ask questions about thread, colors and design, showing them what you’re working on, what you‘re planning. Other people in the store admire your work. They have questions. They give me a lot of suggestions, and you take it from there.”