William Rhodes | You Reap What You Sew

While the earliest evidence of quilting dates back more than 5000 years to an Egyptian pharaoh, quilting arrived in the United States in the hands of immigrant communities, some of them no doubt descended from those early North African predecessors. At their most fundamental, quilts are meant to be used: tactile, tangible embodiments of stories and relationships that you hold in your hands or wrap around you for warmth, comfort, and even protection. As works that bear histories felt in the present, their many meanings deepen through ongoing use.  The relational histories of the quilts’ making can be found in the fabric itself as well as in the making process, often pieced and quilted in community bees. Echoing familial and societal economies, quilt-making can also adapt to economic hardship and find form in beautiful patchwork quilts created from the scant scraps of fabric left when clothes are worn away, a practice that forms a bridge between utility, domesticity, beauty, and thrift.

Contemporary quilts are pieced, appliquéd, embroidered, and sewn whole cloth into an abundance of forms and distinct traditions. Pieced quilts alone can take shape in the repetitive patterning of Amish stars and bear claws, or the vivid and asymmetrical abstractions of the quilts of Gee’s Bend in Alabama. San Francisco-based artist, William Rhodes, was raised in Baltimore, Maryland in a family with farming roots, surrounded by quilters such as mother-daughter pair Elizabeth and Joyce Scott, who made works that in his words, “recorded memory, recorded stories.” 

The quilts and stitched portraits on view here are the harvest of many hours sharing stories with elders in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunter’s Point and Fillmore neighborhoods, long Black and Brown communities that have endured decades of rising home prices and the displacement of families. Rhodes chose portrait quilts because he wanted to visually document a community that’s disappearing, first painting portraits of houseless neighbors to make  visible the footprint they left. As the project grew, he expanded it to include community elders. While he made photographs and they quilted together, participants shared stories that are almost literally stitched into the quilts in a process of community building and a refusal to forget or be forgotten. 

Rhodes’ family members used to say, “You reap what you sow.” If you concentrate on bringing into the world a good, healthy harvest by planting good seed in the spring, you can ensure a nourishing harvest in the late summer or fall. Rhodes never forgot that expression, and today often thinks about how it relates to the world we live in. In a time of unrest, amidst synchronous crises of public health, police violence, and a movement that seeks to undermine the foundations of a multiracial democracy, what are the seeds that we plant for a bountiful harvest?