Yvonne Wells started quilting at the age of 40. Now, at the age of 85, the art world is finally taking notice

Yvonne Wells does things her own way. The 85-year-old artist has made more than 500 quilts over the last four and a half decades, but she will enthusiastically say that she never learned to sew “properly.”

“People were coming in and telling me I had to go to sewing school,” Wells said on a video call from her home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “But I don’t care if people see the stitches. My stitches are so loose that I can lift them up and just walk around in them.”

The artist, born in Tuscaloosa in 1939, began quilting for the same reason many do: she wanted to keep her family warm. Using old clothes belonging to her children, her husband and herself, she began cutting and sewing to create her quilts. She was inspired by the memories of her own mother.

“I needed something other than mowing the yard and cleaning the house. “My mother made quilts out of clothes, bedspreads and anything else she could find,” she recalls. “She would fix it during the day and put it on at night to keep us warm.” However, Wells’ practical inspirations soon gave way to a wave of creativity. She felt an unquenchable desire to create.

“I use anything I can stick a needle into, and it tells my story,” she said with her trademark quick-witted charm. Working between a large room on the ground floor of her house and the so-called “quilt cave” where she organized her quilts, Wells became famous for cutting up everything left in the house. Sometimes she incorporated unexpected materials such as canvas, shoelace, screen wire, and others. Her husband and children soon learned to put their clothes in the basket or risk losing them in the quilt.

Initially, Wells did not consider these works to be art. After initial hesitation, in 1985 a local art agent persuaded her to show her work at the Kentuck Art Festival in Northport, Alabama. “I never wanted to show my stuff because I was comparing it to the other quilts that are here and it didn’t look like all the others,” she explained. In her first year in the program, she won the “Best in Show” title. “I said, ‘What in the world is going on?’” she recalled with an incredulous laugh. “Best in the show?” Wells has won this title multiple times.

Over the following decades, the audience for Wells’ quilts expanded. She is best known for her Story Quilts, narrative paintings that tell the story of everything from Bible stories to moments from the Civil Rights Movement. Wells never pursued formal perfection so much as energetic expression, using curved strips of fabric in unexpected combinations that somehow work together. These quilts can alternately display the self-taught insouciance of Bill Traylor’s paintings or the lively sharing of knowledge about Corita Kent’s prints.

“I deal with disorganization very well,” Wells said of her varied approaches. “The more disorganized I am, the better the quilt. It gives me time to think and see what the piece says to me, as well as how its shape looks and strikes a conversation with other quilts.

Now, forty-five years into his practice, Wells is experiencing his first major moment of recognition in the art world. In September, the artist had her first museum exhibition, “Picture This: The Story Quilts of Yvonne Wells,” at the Paul R. Jones Museum in Tuscaloosa, which featured works from the beginning of her career to recent, never-before-seen works. The exhibition coincided with the publication of the monograph The Story of Quilts by Yvonne Wells by the University of Alabama Press.

Now, in her second solo exhibition at New York’s Fort Gansevoort, “Beyond Patchwork,” the gallery showcases Wells’ more abstract quilting in 15 works (through November 2) created since 1987. to the present. The gallery’s curator relies on her more abstract visions. Unlike the narratives in her Story Quilts, these compositions are illusory allusions to stories that are never articulated but appear in the margins. Wells, for his part, shares their sentiments.

“They have the same meaning, the same amount of energy and the same amount of techniques that I put into the other quilts,” she said.

In one of the works shown in the exhibition, it is her quilt from 1990 Sea monsterthe whale-like form is made from circular cuts of various flannels. The creature floats through a sea of ​​pastel yellow material and appears to squirt or lift black shapes upwards. Looking again, one wonders if the titular “sea monster” shape is intended to represent a mermaid.

In some ways, Wells’s abstract quilts more effectively nod to the power of material culture. American flags appear here and there, including artwork It’s me (2000) i Crazy Quilt (2017). The flag places Wells in a pantheon of female creators that dates back to Betsy Ross’s upholstery, while at the same time carrying with it everything that the flag – a few strips of fabric sewn together in an abstract form – connotes freedom, war, and many other things in between. Such recognizable signs are juxtaposed with more mysterious forms: a haunted eye or animal beings.

Wells admits that the girls from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, came to spread the word about her work, even though she was unaware of it when she started. They are referenced directly in the quilt Gees Bend Roadin which the kente fabric is combined with an intense pink fabric and a fruit and leaf pattern characteristic of the tablecloth. In such works, Wells creates a kind of time travel. These fabrics bring to mind different family members, the clothes they wore, the houses they lived in, and the places they traveled.

In a work from 1987 Round quiltthe concentric circles of countless quilted fabrics become a kind of dendrochronology in textiles, stopping the passage of time, the expanding family circles in its swirling form. For Wells, a quilt must be made with love. It is actually a kind of tenderness.

“The quilt has a functional and decorative function. But the quilt can be a love letter written to someone I care about very much,” she said. “Quilts feel good and I have to feel good when I make them.”