Rosie Lee Tompkins was the pseudonym for Richmond, California, quilt maker Effie Mae Howard, who relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area from the South during the second wave of the Great Migration, and who wished to remain anonymous. Despite her wish for privacy, her work has been exhibited and published widely, most notably in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

Tompkins had a love for lush, brilliant fabrics, velvet in particular, and, unlike many African American quilt makers, she preferred to work with new fabrics purchased directly from fabric stores. She employed a broad array of classic quilt patterns, including the triangle, strip, and block, creating complex spatial arrangements that combined small piecework squares within larger color swaths. As a result, her work pulsates with energy and rhythm, as exemplified in this quilt from 1996.

This quilt is one of ten quilts the Fine Arts Museums acquired from the Eli Leon Trust in 2019. Oakland resident Eli Leon was a psychologist, writer, collector, and self-taught scholar of African American quilts who, over the course of thirty years, championed the work of East Bay quilt makers—especially Tompkins. Of her work, Leon writes, “Ultimately, Tompkins’s expectations-shattering color composition, authoritative style, simplicity in complexity, consummate integrity, and soul-to-soul delivery of emotional truth defy classifications” (Leon 1997, 12). jkd