Mozell Benson | Artist of the Alabama Public Television Art Auction

Artists « Mozell Benson

Mozell Benson (Folk Quilts)

Born in 1934, Mozell Benson was taught to quilt by her mother, Cleo, but was not interested in sewing until later in life. The youngest of ten children, she is the daughter of sharecropper Isaiah Stephens, a man who could do anything with anything, and make anything from anything. When his house burned down while the family worked in the field, he found another house somewhere, took it apart board by board, and built a new home on his land.

On 365 rented acres he grew cotton, corn and peanuts, and raised cows and goats, chickens and hogs. He butchered, he made baskets to bring the cotton from the fields, he blacksmithed, he plowed. Improvisation made life possible. It’s how they survived. It’s why Benson knew, when she raised ten children on nothing or its nearest relative, that when the canned fruit jar was empty, you make jelly from the leftover juice.

Benson’s quilting reflects the thrift and industry of her rural southern life. She creates approximately twenty quilts a year, piecing them during the spring, summer, and fall, and in the winter, quilting the year's tops and linings together. Although she will sometimes give them away, she makes quilts mostly for the use of her family. Over the last few years, Benson has taught her oldest child, Sylvia Stephens,* improvised quilting techniques she taught herself after learning to quilt from her mother and sisters.

Benson allows a quilt top design to evolve while she is piecing, and rarely uses patterns. She selects, cuts, and sews her scraps to make something new and original. Her wide strips, wider than in typical African-American quilt strips, and her bright colors, show off her quilt top designs. Her multi-colored patterns often look like modern art. In another generation, she might have gone to art school and become a painter, as her quilts often come across as paintings in cloth. Her quilts are the visual equivalent of jazz or blues because she often takes a basic pattern idea and then creates variations on it—just as a musician will do with a jazz piece. Many people give scraps of cloth to her because they admire her quilts.

Benson¹s quilts also reflect the African aesthetic of multiple patterning and the African traditions of small, square, red, protective charms, called mojos in African-American culture. Mozell comments, “Black families inherited this tradition. We forget where it came from because nobody continues to teach us. I think we hold to that even though we're not aware of it.” Benson has appeared in a traveling exhibition entitled “Signs and Symbols: African Images in African-American Quilts from the Rural South,” and in 1985 she traveled to Africa to demonstrate her craft for the Nigerian Council of Women's Studies as part of a U. S. State Department program.

It wasn’t until the 20th century that quilts were recognized as anything other than women’s craft. Even when the highly symmetrically and meticulously stitched Amish quilts and other traditional forms gained acceptance, African-American quilts remained outside the circle with their wild variations of traditional quilt patterns — that is, when they followed a pattern at all. The use of bold, contrasting colors, and oft-displayed indifference to uniform stitch size or acute angles — the fussy essentials of many a traditional quilt show — seemed foreign. The fact that the quilts were a collection of leftover scraps, old clothing, or whatever was on hand, created a barrier for some viewers. But the eventual embrace of these quilts proved a quantum leap, an elevation of quilting beyond craft and into art.

A few years back, the owners of an art gallery in Tennessee offered to represent Mozell and sell her quilts. She’d share the profits with the gallery, which could put her quilts before the buying public in a way that hadn’t occurred before. But there were problems, not the least of which was the gallery’s desire for the right of first-refusal for all Mozell’s quilts — standard art-world stuff. It meant that before Mozell could sell, or even give away, any quilt she made, the gallery got first crack.

Mozell turned the gallery down, partly because the document — the usual daunting tangle of legalese and technical provisions — made her uncomfortable, but also because giving is what she does. Giving is who she is. “That’s part of her ethical being,” commented a friend. “It is part of her very being to give quilts away.”

* A professional freelance journalist and technical writer, Sylvia Stephens is an Alabama Folk Life Community Scholar and “apprentice quilter” studying under her mother, Mozell Benson.

Selected Exhibitions and Awards

Smithsonian Institution
Boston Museum of Fine Arts
American Craft Museum
American Folk Art Museum
Tampa Museum of Art
Nigerian Council of Women’s Studies 1985
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) National Heritage Fellowship 2001

Items in the APT Auction

Southern African-American, Double-Sided Quilt
Prayers & Blessings

Mozell Benson (Folk Quilts)

Selected Exhibitions and Awards

Items in the APT Auction

Related Links