Art in Your Inbox

Love art? Let’s stay in touch. Sign up for email updates from NMWA.    

Two museum visitors observe works of art in a modern gallery.
National Museum of Women in the Arts

Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California

A vibrant, hand-quilted cotton textile features a combination of blue, orange, yellow, and red patchwork.

Through nearly 80 quilted objects spanning 120 years, Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California traces how Black women leaving the Jim Crow South stitched a legacy of survival, connection, and resilience across generations. Exhibited on the East Coast for the first time, this must-see exhibition tells a uniquely American story in the context of the Second Great Migration, a mass movement of approximately five million African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North and West between 1940 and 1970. The quilts and traditions that they carried offered warmth and protection, while also serving as emblems of memory and cultural survival.