A meditation on African American quilts

Good morning, DMV! It’s Thursday, Oct. 29.

Slow down. Observe. Earlier this week, I went to the National Museum of Women in the Arts to meditate on quilts.

I love the symmetry and off-center asymmetry of the piece. Notice the strip of pink in the upper left quadrant, yellow in the lower left, and next to that a small strip of turquoise-green with hints of ochre.

In the upper right quadrant, a line of sky blue.

The sky blue is echoed in the center, which is surrounded by shades of indigo and violet.

This was one of more than 80 pieces — by 70 artists spanning 120 years — in “Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California.”

The exhibit “traces the flow and flourishing of quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration, a mass movement of approximately five million African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North and West between 1940 and 1970 in search of a more equitable life.”

You can visit the museum and see the show free Sunday, the monthly community day. From 10 to 4 p.m., the museum will host a Quilt Documentation Day to celebrate and preserve African American quilt history. Ten DMV community members have signed up to bring a family quilt to the museum and share their family history with the African American Quilt Documentation Study Group, a community of scholars, artists and cultural preservationists. There will also be people quilting that day at the museum.

I’d visited the museum for its press preview in September, but it was too much to absorb in one go. So on Tuesday, I went again.

I zoomed out.

Then I zoomed in. A piece made with intact overalls!

These colors. They seem a hodgepodge yet feel perfect together. How?

Viewing these pieces had a calming effect. I thought of the quilters piecing together thousands of scraps, stitch by stitch. This is the epitome of upcycling before it was a thing, a movement from the chaos of so many remnants of fabric toward union and harmony.

Dear readers: I consider my Daily Dose a community gratitude journal. Please consider supporting my work with a one-time, monthly or yearly donation to help make this project sustainable.

Capital Weather says: Morning clouds give way to increasing sunshine as temperatures climb to around 70 or a bit higher this afternoon. Read the full forecast here.

Saturday 9:30 a.m. — The Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA) is organizing a “Hains Point Hoopla” ride to call for the protection of East Potomac Park. A group will meet at Smithsonian station and ride or run to Hains Point with the DC Activist Street Band. Or you can join the rally directly at Hains Point at 10 a.m.

I plan to go to observe and report. Say hello if you spot me — I’ll be wearing the fluorescent yellow helmet and safety best, though I’m guessing many people will be wearing the same.

Plus…

The beached buoy in Delaware — that D.C. resident C. Stewart Verdery Jr. first showed us and Constantia Rioux photographed herself with for scale — was rescued yesterday. It had been washed ashore by a nor’easter in September, according to local media.

Stewart sent me a photo of this Facebook post of a Chinook helicopter that had landed next to the Dewey Beach buoy during the removal operation.

Here are videos of the removal.

The buoy was from New Jersey, will be taken to Virginia and later put back in the water, CoastTV reported.

Now back to your joy: Share your photos of Halloween in the DMV here.

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