Panelists Biographies
Sally A. Nuamah, Phd
assistant professor, Northwestern University
Sally Nuamah, PhD is a professor of Urban Politics in Human Development, Social Policy and Political Science at Northwestern University. She has previously, held appointments at Duke University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University and Princeton University.
Dr. Nuamah is author of the critically acclaimed How Girls Achieve, and the founder of Herstory: the TWII Foundation Girls Scholarship. She has an award winning film titled, HerStory, based on this work. She was named as a Forbes Magazine 2019 “30 under 30” in education, and named Andrew Carnegie Fellow aka “The Brainy Award.”
Dr. Pearlie M. Johnson, Phd
Independent Scholar
“West African textile techniques, particularly narrow-strip weaving has influenced 19th and 20th century African American strip quilting in North America. As a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Africans brought unique skills in textile making with them to North America.” - Dr. Pearlie M. Johnson
Pearlie M. Johnson, PhD has a Ph.D in Art History and Sociology with an emphasis in Africana Studies. Dr. Johnson served as Assistant Professor in the Departments of Pan-African Studies and Fine Arts at the College of Wooster, the University of Missouri-Kansas, and the University Of Louisville. In addition to African and African American Art, other areas of specialty include African Textile Arts and Aesthetics and African American Contemporary Art Quilts. Her research explores a complex system of symbols and encoded images that address theoretical issues related to African and African American Studies. Using an African-centered perspective, Dr. Johnson's scholarship examines the retention, adaptation, and reinterpretation of African cultural traditions in African American Visual Arts.
Tracy L. Vaughn-Manley, phd
Assistant Professor, Northwestern University
Director of Undergraduate Studies,
Northwestern University
Dr. Vaughn-Manley discusses the distinctive aspects that define the Black aesthetic quilting tradition and how quilting is used by Black women writers: Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, and others to assert individual/collective agency and build community.
Doris Barnes
Manager, African Festival Of the Arts Quilt Pavilion, Needles & Threads, Member
"I am an award-winning quilter. I quilt seven days a week. There is an empty space in my heart if I go a day without quilting. I use non-traditional style patterns and bold colors. It is my passion. I teach quilting at my church and make many charity quilts for the sick and the shut-in.”
Reneau Diallo, PhD
FOUNDER, African Festival of the Arts Quilt Pavilion
Quilt artist
Certified nurse-midwife
https://www.facebook.com/reneaudiallo.house
"All quilts have a story to tell and express the aesthetics of the quilt maker. Quilt making creates a tapestry for healing...it warm's the soul."
Someone once stated. "A blanket warms your body, but a quilt warms your soul”. So, I picked up a rotary cutter, a few bright African print fabrics and my first quilt. I coined the phrase "Afriquilt" and began my journey as a quiltmaker.
Over the years I have explored numerous quilt-making designs and techniques, but realize that simplistic designs with bold, vibrant colors gets my dopamine Rowing. I enjoy playing with colors and experimenting with how they work together. I cherish a sense of freedom by taking an improvisational/contemporary approach and ignoring the rules of quilt making and/or color theory. One of my greatest pleasures is to work freely without a design, auditioning bright, bold colors and textures of fabrics, and allowing the quilt to create its' own rhythm or tapestry. I believe the quilt tells me how to proceed.
I am honored to have quilts on display nationally and internationally in galleries, schools. hospitals. and with individual collectors. However. quilts that I help to construct with community organizations and that are given from the heart tend to provide the greatest fulfillment.
There is the continued debate if quilt making is an art or craft. I believe it can be both depending the creator’s approach to a particular Regardless, if quilt making is an art or craft, I must acknowledge therapeutic value and healing property. All quilts have a story to tell and express the aesthetics of the maker. Quilt making Creates a tapestry for healing… it warms the soul.
Quilting Exhibits/Projects
Quilt Exhibit: Original Sewing and Quilting Exhibition. National Traveling Exhibit
Featured on ArtBeat Chicago
Accepted in juried show Ghetto Biennale in Haiti
Initiated the Quilt Pavilion African Festival Of the Arts
Gallery Walk by Africa International House: 2001 Exhibited and lectured on the Art Of Quilting
Basil Kincaid
Artist
https://basilkincaid.art/shop
https://vimeo.com/142436654
Basil Kincaid (b. 1986, St. Louis, Missouri) is a post disciplinary artist who constructs, contemplates and revises self-imposed and conditioned limitations, and explores their fixity. Through quilting, collaging, photography, installation and performance done with found, salvaged and donated materials.
Kincaid discards social mores while drafting alternative cultural fabrics. With an improvisational and community oriented approach, resourcefulness and freedom of imagination emerge as critical components in the liberation of spirit.
Kincaid studied drawing and painting at Colorado College, graduating in 2010. Kincaid has exhibited works with Hauser & Wirth, Mindy Solomon, Kravets Wehby, Kavi Gupta, Carl Kostyal and others. In 2019, Kincaid debuted their first museum performance, “The Release,” at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis MO. In 2020 Kincaid received the Regional Arts Commission Fellowship. In 2021, Kincaid became a United States Artist Fellow and joined the Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Kim Dulaney, EdD
Assistant professor, chicago state univ
Director of Education and Programs,
The DuSable Museum of African American History
Dr. Dulaney is an African American Studies professor, cultural critic, writer, and cultural consultant.
“Quilting is the art form that is most symbolic of African and African American - African diasporic culture, where we take things that are considered scraps and we find beauty in them, and we meld them together to make things that are useful."
Shantay Robinson, PhD Candidate
Freelance Art Writer
Shantay Robinson is a Writing and Rhetoric doctoral candidate at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Shantay is a freelance art writer at Black Art in America, Washington City and Smithsonian Magazine. She has also written for Arts ATC Nashville Scene. ARTS, BLACK, AFROPUNK, Sugarcane Magazine and Number. She has published scholarly articles in Teaching Artist Journal and International Review of African American Art.
Shantay Robinson was a participant in the class Of Burnaway Magazine’s Art Writers Mentorship Program, a fellow at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies Digital Publishing Project Editorial Fellowship, and she was chosen for the CUE Art Foundation' Art Critic Mentoring program.
She presented conference papers about art and education at SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) Symposium on Art and Fashion. Georgia State University’s New Voices Graduate Student Conference, Georgia State University's Glorious Hair and Academic Identities Conference, Northeast Modern Languages Association Conference, Mason Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference, and New York African Studies Association Conference.
In 2019, she sat on a panel at Prizm Art Fair during Miami Art Week. In 2020 she served as visual arts judge at Shreveport Regional Council’s Critical Mass 8 Art Competition.
Jim S. Smoote II,
Mixed Media and Fabric Artist
Jim S. Smoote II, born December 4, 1950 in Grenada, Mississippi. I moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1956. Educated in the Chicago Public School System. I earned a BFA and a MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago with dual degrees in Textile Design, and Art Education. I taught high school and elementary art in the Chicago Public School system for 35 years (now retired). During that time, I mixed-media textiles that have been exhibited internationally (North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia). Generally my work explores humor, contemporary urban images, pop cultural references, can be political or provocative, all through the use of traditional techniques (patchwork, applique quilting) with non-traditional (drawing, painting, digital printing) and materials.
Maude Coker Davis
founder, Quageh Liberian Quilters
"We hope to see every Liberian woman do something, like quilt making, to help their family." - Maude Coker Davis.
Following Liberia' civil crisis, a group of women came together in 2004 to make quilts to sell in order to provide for their families It is believed their quilting Skills were from elders who loamed the craft from the freed slaves, brought to Liberia, after the U.S. Civil War.