Alice Beasley | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1945 (age 79–80) Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S. |
| Education | Marygrove College (BA), University of California, Berkeley (JD) |
| Occupation(s) | Quilter, textile artist, journalist, civil rights attorney |
| Known for | Quilting |
| Website | www |
Alice Beasley (born 1945) is an African-American quilter and textile artist, and a former journalist and civil rights attorney.
Alice Beasley was born in 1945, in Tuskegee, Alabama. [1] [2] [3] Her family moved to Michigan when she was four years old; she grew up in Detroit. [4]
Beasley attended Marygrove College in Detroit, earning a bachelor's degree in journalism in 1962. [1] [2] [5] She worked for The Detroit News as an entertainment reporter. [4] She later moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where she worked at the San Francisco Chronicle for approximately one year as a features reporter. [4] Beasley attended University of California, Berkeley, earning her J.D. degree, with a specialty in civil rights litigation and constitutional law, in 1973. [2] [6]
Beasley started her own law firm with two friends after graduating from Berkeley. [7] During her law career, she worked for the NAACP legal defense fund. [8]
She began making art as a respite from her day job as an attorney. [2] As she was "facile with fabric and also liked to draw," [7] she wondered if she could create portraits with fabric. She started quilting in 1988, [7] her inspirations ranging from Modigliani, Vermeer, and Rembrandt to Chuck Close and Hung Liu. [7] She began her career as a full-time quilt artist after her retirement from the legal profession in January 2007. [1] [4]
She has had her work displayed at the Joyce Gordon Gallery, [7] Berkeley Art Center, [9] Myrtle Beach Art Museum, [10] the American Folk Art Museum, [10] the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum, [10] The Textile Museum in Washington D.C., [11] Los Medanos College, [2] the Clinton Presidential Center, [1] [2] the Quilt National, [12] the California Heritage Museum, [13] Rutgers University Art Museum, [13] the Featherstone Center for the Arts in Massachusetts, [14] and abroad in Spain, France, Japan, Namibia, and Croatia. [11]
The De Young Museum in San Francisco holds her work in their collection, as does the San Francisco Arts Commission and the County of Alameda. [10] One of her works, A Meditation on Time, is in the permanent collection of the United States Embassy in Chad. [15] [16] She has done commissions for the Richmond California Housing Authority, Stanford University, [17] and the Highland Hospital in Oakland. [18]
She is a Juried Artist Member at the Studio Art Quilt Associates, [19] and a member of the African American Quilt Guild of Oakland. [8] [20]
Beasley is known for her appliqué quilts, which she creates using commercial and hand-printed fabrics. [8] [21] [22] Much of her work contains social or political commentary. [8] Some of her work is not intended to be explicitly political in nature, but has been described as "highly politicized". [8] On the topic of one of her portraits which depicts a young Black man, Beasley once said, “Frankly, anytime you are showing the humanity of a Black man these days, you are necessarily entering into a narrative that requires a movement just to expound the simple proposition that Black lives matter.” [8]
Some of her artworks depict or commemorate historical figures, including Miles Davis, [23] Thelton Henderson, [23] Martin Luther King Jr., [24] Trayvon Martin, [25] Barack Obama, [23] Betty Reid Soskin, [18] and Ida B. Wells. [1] Other artworks reference historical events and movements, like Shelby County v. Holder, [26] the Rwandan Civil War, [27] and the African-American women's suffrage movement, [1] as well as subjects in contemporary politics, such as the NRA, anti-Black racism, Black life in the United States, climate change, pollution, the impact of social media, and essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. [8] [24] One example of Beasley's commentary pieces is From Russia With Love (2017), which depicts Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump as the two embracing figures from The Kiss by Gustav Klimt. [24] She has also created still lifes, [28] landscapes, [16] works about her family history, [23] [29] and portraits from her imagination. [8] [30]
Beasley was married to Dave Cohn from 2007 until his death in 2016. [7] [31] She lives in Piedmont, California, near Oakland. [2]
Beasley's work refers to a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that resulted in the closure of almost 1,000 polling places, many in African-American communities.
