Tuscaloosa quilter Yvonne Wells earns Governor’s Arts Award

Posted Jun 24, 2019 at 8:00 AM

Over four decades as an internationally known quilter, Yvonne Wells has been lauded and applauded from Northport to Washington, D.C., to New York City; from Vence, France, to Pietrasantra, Italy, to Tokyo.

Last month, the lifetime Tuscaloosan added a Governor’s Arts Award to her collection, in an elegant ceremony at Montgomery’s Alabama Shakespeare Festival, a Kennedy Center Honors-style black-tie event.

“I told someone that if heaven felt like this, I’m ready to go,” Wells said. “It was amazing ... a community of great artists, a great audience, great people.”

Click HERE for more photos of Yvonne Wells and her quilts.

Among the other honorees were south Alabama writer and journalist Frye Gaillard, Montgomery dancer-choreographer Sudha Raghuram, and Eufaula-born Martha Reeves, who as lead singer of the Vandellas soared atop iconic R&B/rock hits “Heat Wave,” “Dancing in the Street,” “Jimmy Mack” and “Nowhere to Run.”

“I didn’t know the other honorees,” Wells said, “which is a good thing, because you make more friends that way.

“Martha Reeves was here, and I knew her songs, from way back in the ’60s. I got a chance to talk with her, but she didn’t let me know who she was. I guess she wanted to remain incognito.”

Each of the honorees — who also included poet, educator and founder of the Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project at Auburn University Kyes Stevens; arts patrons Jim and Elmore Inscoe, who received the Jonnie Dee Riley Little Lifetime Achievement Award; and Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle, the Council Legacy Award — was honored with musical, visual and spoken tributes.

Wells’ nomination was submitted by Stacy Morgan, a professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, who teaches a course on African-American folk art, and is working with the quilter on a book about her life and art career.

Words from his nomination appears in the current issue of Alabama Arts magazine. In it, Morgan notes Wells neither studied quilting in a formal setting nor learned at the knee of an older relative. “Rather, Wells made her first quilt in 1979 for purely practical reasons: to help keep herself warm during the winter months.”

Initially she worked in traditional patterns, but by 1985 made the creative leap to the large-scale story-pictorial quilts she’s known and celebrated for, looping in various non-traditional materials, such as used clothing, discarded flags or bottle caps

“As Wells explains, ‘anything I can stick a needle in’ is fair game for inclusion in her quilts,” Morgan wrote.

Those who’ve visited Wells’ booths at the Kentuck Festival of the Arts, where she holds a center of the park location, a place of pride and tradition, know her subject matter’s as diverse as her choice of materials. Quilts can range from religious — Noah’s Ark to the Whole Armor of God to the Crucifixion to Proverbs, to a series built around the seven deadly sins — to great figures and moments of the civil rights Movement, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks or Jackie Robinson; to pop culture icons such as Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Marilyn Monroe, Tiger Woods and Danica Patrick; to more mundane images from nature or everyday life, to children’s stories and a category she calls “potluck,” covering most everything else. Black history stretches from biblical times, through slavery to freedom, in her On the Move series. Not all of them tell stories: Some include more figurative pictures or images that emerge from her vast button collections.

Wells has won the Kentuck Festival’s Best in Show six times, including her first entry, in 1985, but for decades before that, she’d worked as an educator. She graduated from Druid High School in 1957, one of eight children, and afterward stayed home to care for their ailing mother; her father passed away when she was just 5. She earned a bachelor’s degree in health and physical education from Stillman College in 1964, and began teaching physical education in the Tuscaloosa City Schools, adding a master’s in adult basic education from Alabama State in 1975. Wells taught full time until 2000, after which she continued subbing for some years.

Another UA professor, Robert Cargo, helped Wells’ rise to prominence, displaying her quilts in his downtown Tuscaloosa Cargo Folk Art Gallery, and sharing her work and story with numerous friends and contacts in the wider art world. Troy native Nall Hollis included Wells in his sprawling Alabama Art 2000 exhibit, which opened at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art before traveling to Vence, France, where Nall — who goes professionally by his first name — lives and works. Wells was able to visit and work in residency with his N.A.L.L. Art Association.

Her work’s also been shown on nationally touring exhibitions; in Japan, Italy; and in the collections of the American Museum of Folk Art in New York City and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. In collaboration with Hallmark, some of Wells’ quilt images have been printed on a series of cards.

“Certainly she’s had many accolades over the years, and very well-deserved,” Morgan said. He worked with Joey Brackner and Elliot Knight of the Alabama State Council on the Arts, which creates the celebration, to shape her nomination. “The Governor’s Arts Award was one of the major ones, the feathers in her cap, that she hadn’t received yet.”

The celebratory evening at the ASF mixed a little soul, a little religion, a little pop, ”...a little bit of everything, like I use a little bit of everything in my work,” Wells said.

“Right now I’m in the process of making Humpty Dumptys, all kinds of fabric materials,” she said. “These will be in small pieces. But after this, I’ll go into large pieces, so I can have enough to present at my booth at Kentuck.” This October will mark her 34th Kentuck Festival appearance. “People come to see me, and I don’t want to disappoint.”

When friends or fans come to visit Wells’ home, about two blocks from where she was born and raised, in the vicinity of Stillman, she’s happy to show work, but awards? They’re in a drawer.

“But just about everything I’ve ever done is in books and notebooks. I have that in order, so it’s quite helpful” as she and Morgan collaborate on the book project. Though there’s no set deadline, it could be published as soon as 2020. She’ll have been retired from the schools 20 years by then, but though she’s never sitting still, the quilts aren’t coming more frequently with extra time.

“I think I was much more productive when I was teaching,” she said. “I had more to do, I had to go to work; but after work, I knew I had to go home and do something.”

Now with less on her plate, she’s more likely to put the quilting aside for a bit, and go work in the yard.

“It takes patience,” Wells said. “My old friends, they know me as the busy bee, the fast person who nevers stops moving. They wonder how I can make a quilt, when you have to sit still. Well, I sit still, but then I get up and do something. I have no order but my order. I have no pace but my pace.”

Once an image or idea arrives, she jumps in.

“It’s something that just pops into my head,” she said. “I’m creative all the time. As I work, the things that I see, that are pressing, I go and start on them. Once I already have most of the concept, once I sit down, I go right at it. Sometimes it’s a week, a month, two months, a year ... But 98 percent of the time, I try to finish in two months.

“I don’t have to sketch it. I just pick up my scissors, and put my fabric on the floor. My head has to see it, my heart has to feel, then my hands have to create that. Those are my three Hs.”

Though Wells typically works solo, she’s contributed to group projects such as the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, a memorial work for her church, Brown Memorial Presbyterian, and the Tuscaloosa Bicentennial Quilt, now on display at the Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center through July. Four other quilters crafted a section each — north, south, east and west — working in picture-story style, and Wells completed the work, brought it all together. She’s also taught for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at UA, and spoken and demonstrated for Morgan’s and other classes. She doesn’t try to teach her style, but oversees, to make sure students have three essentials: the backing, the batting and the front story or image.

“Quilting is something I love to do,” she said, this art she taught herself; the educator self-educating.

“I learned on my own. That’s why everything I make is right,” she said, laughing.