Strip Medallion quilt

Annie Mae Young

1976 · Top: cotton and cotton-polyester blend; back: cotton-polyester blend · Modern and Contemporary Art

This quilt started William Arnett, the founder of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, on his quest to collect and exhibit quilts made in the Gee’s Bend area. In 1997 he saw an image of Young with this quilt draped over her woodpile in order to display it to visiting quilt historian and photographer Roland L. Freeman. Arnett was so struck by the extraordinary vitality of the medallion quilt, with its glowing center of strips of corduroy surrounded by a wide border of pieced denim, that he arranged to visit Young. That visit, and the purchase of this work, led to Arnett meeting more than 150 other quilt makers from the area. In the course of many visits over a four-year period, he purchased hundreds of quilts, twenty of which are now in The Met’s collection.

Artist

Annie Mae Young

Date

1976

Medium

Top: cotton and cotton-polyester blend; back: cotton-polyester blend

Department

Modern and Contemporary Art

Credit line

Gift of Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, 2014