Section 1: Our Ancestors' Dreams

Beginning with Harriet, Our Spy, this section considers the creative and cultural inheritance artist Kim F. Hall surfaces in her work. Through a striking red-toned multi-dimensional “I, Spy” puzzle quilt evoking the graphic contours of a United States flag, Hall celebrates the achievements of Harriet Tubman (1822-1913). Tubman was an abolitionist fighter who freed herself and rescued over 70 family and friends from enslavement using the Underground Railroad. She was also the first woman in U.S. history to lead a military operation – the 1863 Combahee River Raid –which liberated more than 700 enslaved people. Harriet, Our Spy employs subjects and motifs central to Hall’s work: embedded text and historical artifacts, appliquéd patterns from American quilt traditions, and textile prints from across the African diaspora. Hall engages with themes of Black women’s resistance that connect her work to other Black feminist artists such as Allison Saar (Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial, 2010) and Faith Ringgold (Flag Story Quilt, 1985). This piece also reveals the legacy of the artist’s mother and artistic collaborator, Vera P. Hall, whose quilts are renowned for depicting African-American history through historical documents, images, and text.

Reproductions of Vera P. Hall’s pieces Civil War: Devotion to Freedom (2020), We, Too Sing America (2006-2008), and Harriet Tubman (2008) hang alongside her daughter’s work. Vera P. Hall’s Harriet provides a contrasting, immersive view of Tubman in action with her rifle in the foreground, leading her charges through a forest against a night sky.

Many of Kim F. Hall’s selected pieces preserve family memories and personal experiences. Mourning Quilt for H. Lawrence Hall (2024) represents the artist’s father, her mentor and go-to advisor, who passed away suddenly in 2023. This work by Vera P. Hall (with contributions from Kim and brother Dr. Reginald L. Hall) makes use of funerary cloth Kim received from Ghana, which frames a silhouette portrait of her father as a young man. The piecing of this quilt evokes mother and daughter’s shared process of creating through grief.

Two pieces in the vitrine, The Needle Tells the Story (2024), and the unfinished Unreasonable, Unjustified Overreaction (2025), illuminate Kim F. Hall’s commitment to disrupting historical silences. Despite decades of amassed evidence, historians of early American quilting traditions often omit or actively exclude the influence of African-American women on these practices. The “crazy quilt” style has usually been attributed to wealthy white women who had access to luxurious fabrics and ample leisure time. Hall’s crazy quilt and accompanying poem revives the memory of the numerous unnamed African-American women seamstresses, some of whom worked in bondage both alongside and independent of European-American quiltmakers.

The artist describes being moved to create Unreasonable, Unjustified Overreaction after learning about the 1970 killing of students at Jackson State University, a historical moment that is emblematic of state-sponsored violence during the US Civil Rights Movement. Hall uses appliqué and embroidery to render the architecture of the dorm building where the shootings happened, bound by Lynch Street. The sublimation printed titular phrase is riddled with bullet holes – mixing textured media to evoke both the historical scene itself and the ongoing grief that it invokes. This piece shows the artist’s versatility in adapting the structure of a Baltimore Album-style quilt square to engage in a critical framing of recent US history, transforming a craft form once attributed to homemaking, decorative arts, and everyday use, into a tableau for radical memory work.