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Exploring Faith and Art in African American Quilts

Sacred Stitches

Exploring Faith and Art in African American Quilts cover

Exploring Faith and Art in African American Quilts

Sacred Stitches

Quantity
Pre-order. Available 06 Aug 2026
£61.20 RRP £76.50 Website price saving £15.30 (20%)

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Description

This book explores how the art of African American quilts, quilt making, and quilters are source material for the study of African American religion.

Aundrea Matthews argues that quilts are as integral to the fabric of African American religion as slave narrative, music, and literature. Stemming from twenty-four months of ethnographic study in Houston, Texas, Matthews emphasizes how quilts tell visual stories, charting diverse types, practices, and rituals of religious life and the diverse ways people use or make quilts in their daily lives for faith formation within contemporary African American culture. These textile diaries not only record African American's personal lives and experiences, but materialize signs, symbols, images, memories, and/or practices representing African cosmology and mythology that sustain and influence African American religious beliefs and art over time and space. Matthews argues that African American quilts provide tangible evidence of the material retention of African religious memories which influenced the religious thinking and creative art of enslaved African American women and their descendants in the United States.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1: Redirecting the Gaze-African American Quilts as Source
2: State of the Art-The Birth of an African American Tradition
3: Communion of Spirits-The Religious Significance of Quilt Making
Conclusion-We Are All Artists: Appreciating the Art of Our Lives

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 06 Aug 2026
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Extent 256
ISBN 9798216254744
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations 10 tables
Series Religion and Race
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Aundrea Matthews

Aundrea Matthews is the Director of Programs- DEI…

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