Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective, by Elaine Y. Yau, Lawrence Rinder and Horace Ballard. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 175 pages 2020. ISBN: 9780983881384. Paperback, $39.95
Here’s another pandemic art disappointment—the grand exhibition of Rosie Lee Tompkins’ quilts at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Like Elijah Pierce’s carvings at the Barnes Foundation, these quilts clearly need to be experienced in person to get a true sense of their scale and material impact.
Tompkins is widely praised as the greatest quilter of her time, certainly up there with the women of Gees Bend when it comes to imagination and visual skill. Also, like them, she is in the top ranks of 20th-century abstractionists, and her work has escaped the cul-de-sacs of craft and self-taught art. And, again, like the women of Gees Bend, that’s at least partly because of the recognition and promotion of a devoted patron, in this case, Eli Leon, who helped transition her quilts from the swap meet to the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Leon collected quilts in quantity, Tompkins’ included, and he ultimately gifted nearly 3,000 to BAMPFA. The museum now owns 500 of Tompkins’ quilts and included 70 of them in this retrospective.
The show opened Feb. 19, 2020, but the physical run was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic. The museum converted it to a virtual exhibit running through July 18, 2021, including an hour-long virtual tour. It became once again accessible physically in May 2021.
The online resources, together with the printed catalog, provide a fine survey of her work, whose nuances and imaginative leaps are astounding even in the absence of an in-person visit, with the catalog’s essays helping to draw attention to many of those nuances and leaps.
This review originally appeared in The Outsider magazine, published by Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.