Recharting America’s Origin Story Through Quilts

Stephen Towns’s exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art honors black women and Nat Turner, meditates on labor, and makes room for nuance in debates on depictions of historical violence.

BALTIMORE — The room in the Baltimore Museum of Art housing Rumination and a Reckoning, an exhibition of 10 quilts by Stephen Towns, feels more like an intimate chapel than a textiles gallery. It’s not just the religious iconography the local artist laces through his work or the placement of his largest piece, “Birth of a Nation” (2014), as a commanding centerpiece to anchor the smaller, narrative quilts chronicling the private life and fabled rebellion of slave insurgent Nat Turner (much like the Stations of the Cross in a church). It’s also the viewers’ reverence for Towns’s work and the figures stitched within their fibers.

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