Sheryl Sims | |
---|---|
Arts Commissioner for the City of Alexandria, Virginia | |
Assumed office 2022 | |
Personal details | |
Born | Germany |
Alma mater | University of Houston |
Occupation | quilter, historian, genealogist |
Sheryl E. Sims is a German-born American quilter. She was appointed as the Commissioner for the Arts of Alexandria, Virginia in 2022.
Sims was born in Germany, where her father was stationed as an officer in the United States Army. [1] She spent part of her childhood in Thailand. [1] Sims is the fourth-great-grandfather of Andrew Cox, an American patriot. [2] [1] She is also the fourth-great-granddaughter of Calvin Leary, a Louisiana planter, and a woman named Mariah, who was enslaved on his estate, Sunnsyside Plantation. [3] Sims is a 10th-great-granddaughter of the Irish Quaker colonist Valentine Hollingsworth, who was one of the signatories of William Penn's Great Charter. [4]
She was presented as a debutante in her youth. [1] She graduated with a degree in environmental design from the University of Houston. [1]
Sims is a professional quilter. [5] [6] In November 2023, she gave a presentation on her work at her exhibit, titled Ancestry Through Art: Discoveries Revealed in Story Quilts Inspired by Family and Faith at Pope–Leighey House on Woodlawn Plantation in Alexandria, Virginia. [7] [8] Sims' art focuses on her family history, both enslaver and enslaved. [7] She was appointed as Commissioner for the Arts in Alexandria from 2022 to 2024. [1] She serves on the advisory committee for the Virginia Quilt Museum. [9]
She also works as a legal secretary in Washington, D.C. [3]
Sims joined the Nelly Custis Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in 2022. [2] She was the first person of color to be admitted as a member in her chapter. [2] In November 2022, she received the Community Service Award and the Women in the Arts Award from her chapter. [1]
The National Society Daughters of the American Revolution is a lineage-based membership service organization for women who are directly descended from a patriot of the American Revolutionary War. A non-profit group, the organization promotes education and patriotism. Its membership is limited to direct lineal descendants of soldiers or others of the American Revolution era who aided the revolution and its subsequent war. Applicants must be at least 18 years of age and have a birth certificate indicating that their gender is female. DAR has over 190,000 current members in the United States and other countries. The organization's motto is "God, Home, and Country".
Hoodoo is an ethnoreligion that, in a broader context, functions as a set of spiritual observances, traditions, and beliefs—including magical and other ritual practices—developed by enslaved African Americans in the Southern United States from various traditional African spiritualities and elements of indigenous American botanical knowledge. Practitioners of Hoodoo are called rootworkers, conjure doctors, conjure men or conjure women, and root doctors. Regional synonyms for Hoodoo include rootwork and conjure. As an autonomous spiritual system it has often been syncretized with beliefs from Islam brought over by enslaved West African Muslims, and Spiritualism. Scholars define Hoodoo as a folk religion.
Marie Daugherty Webster was a quilt designer, quilt producer, and businesswoman, as well as a lecturer and author of Quilts, Their Story, and How to Make Them (1915), the first American book about the history of quilting, reprinted many times since. She also ran the Practical Patchwork Company, a quilt pattern-making business from her home in Wabash, Indiana, for more than thirty years. Webster's appliquéd quilts influenced modern quilting designs of the early twentieth century. Her quilts have been featured in museums and gallery exhibition in the United States and Japan. The Indianapolis Museum of Art holds the largest collection of her quilts in the United States. Webster was inducted into the Quilters Hall of Fame in 1991. The Marie Webster House, her former residence in Marion, Indiana, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993, and serves as the present-day home of the Quilters Hall of Fame.
Clementine Hunter was a self-taught Black folk artist from the Cane River region of Louisiana, who lived and worked on Melrose Plantation.
Harriet Powers was an American folk artist and quilter born into slavery in rural northeast Georgia. Powers used traditional appliqué techniques to make quilts that expressed local legends, Bible stories, and astronomical events. Powers married young and had a large family. After the American Civil War and emancipation, she and her husband became landowners by the 1880s, but lost their land due to financial problems.
The quilts of Gee's Bend are quilts created by a group of women and their ancestors who live or have lived in the isolated African-American hamlet of Gee's Bend, Alabama along the Alabama River.
Megan Carroll Beyer is an American journalist, activist, and lifelong advocate of women’s rights and gender issues. Beyer is the Director of the Office of Art in Embassies at the U.S. Department of State, appointed by President Joe Biden in 2022. She has served as an advisor to many arts and civic organizations, including Civic Nation, the American Film Institute, and the Better Angels Society.
Laetitia "Lettice" Lee, also known as Lettice Lee Wardrop Thompson Sim, was an American colonial planter, society hostess, slaveowner, and châtelaine of Darnall's Chance. A member of the prominent Lee family of Virginia and Maryland, she lived a privileged life typical for members of the planter class. Unusual for her time, Lee was married three times; first to James Wardrop, then Adam Thompson, and lastly to Colonel Joseph Sim. She lived at Darnall's Chance for the second half of her life, throughout all three of her marriages.
Carolyn L. Mazloomi is an American curator, quilter, author, art historian, and aerospace engineer. She is a strong advocate for presenting and documenting African-American-made quilts. Her own quilts are designed to tell complex stories around African-American heritage and contemporary experiences.
Joyce J. Scott is an African-American artist, sculptor, quilter, performance artist, installation artist, print-maker, lecturer and educator. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016, and a Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019, Scott is best known for her figurative sculptures and jewelry using free form, off-loom beadweaving techniques, similar to a peyote stitch. Each piece is often constructed using thousands of glass seed beads or pony beads, and sometimes other found objects or materials such as glass, quilting and leather. In 2018, she was hailed for working in new medium — a mixture of soil, clay, straw, and cement — for a sculpture meant to disintegrate and return to the earth. Scott is influenced by a variety of diverse cultures, including Native American and African traditions, Mexican, Czech, and Russian beadwork, illustration and comic books, and pop culture.
Elizabeth Talford Scott was an American artist, known for her quilts.
Round Oak is an unincorporated community in Jones County, Georgia, United States. The community is located on Georgia State Route 11, 8.4 miles (13.5 km) north-northwest of Gray.
Lucy Marie (Young) Mingo is an American quilt maker and member of the Gee's Bend Collective from Gee's Bend (Boykin), Alabama. She was an early member of the Freedom Quilting Bee, which was an alternative economic organization created in 1966 to raise the socio-economic status of African-American communities in Alabama. She was also among the group of citizens who accompanied Martin Luther King Jr. on his 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
Anarcha Westcott was an enslaved woman who underwent a series of experimental surgical procedures conducted by physician J. Marion Sims, without the use of anesthesia, to treat a combination of vesicovaginal fistula and rectovaginal fistula. Sims's medical experimentation with Anarcha and other enslaved women, and its role in the development of modern gynaecology, has generated controversy among medical historians.
Chawne Monique Kimber is an African-American mathematician and quilter, known for expressing her political activism in her quilts. She was a professor at Lafayette College, where she headed the department of mathematics. Kimber is now the Dean of the College at Washington and Lee University.
Nettie Pettway Young (1916–2010) was an American artist. She is associated with the Gee's Bend quilting collective and was an assistant manager of the Freedom Quilting Bee. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Frist Art Museum, and is included in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Nasher Museum of Art.
Betty Landon Ray McCain was an American politician and political strategist. She was the North Carolina Secretary of Cultural Resources during Governor Jim Hunt's administration and was the first woman to chair the North Carolina Democratic Party. She was also the first woman named to the state's Advisory Budget Committee. As Secretary of Cultural Resources, McCain opened the North Carolina Museum of History, rededicated USS North Carolina (BB-55), and secured funding for the excavation of the Queen Anne's Revenge. She received the North Carolina Award in 2009 and was inducted into the North Carolina Women's Hall of Fame in 2010.
Dorothea Spotswood Henry was the wife of Patrick Henry. Upon their marriage while he was in office, she served as the first and sixth First Lady of Virginia during Henry's terms as governor, from 1777 to 1779 and 1784 to 1786.
Regina Lynch-Hudson is an American publicist, historian, and travel writer. In 2024, she became the first woman of color descended from Colonel John Hazzard Carson to join the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution and the first black member of the society's Greenlee Chapter.
Johnette Gordon-Weaver is an American historian, genealogist, and activist. She is active in the restoration and historical preservation of black history in Williamsburg, Virginia. In October 2023, she became the first woman of color to join the Williamsburg Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, one of the society's oldest and largest chapters.