USPS honors quiltmaker Harriet Powers
The U.S. Postal Service has released four new commemorative stamps celebrating the work of Harriet Powers, a pioneering 19th-century quiltmaker and storyteller born into slavery. The stamps feature details from her intricate quilts, which are considered masterpieces of American folk art.
Only two of Harriet Powers' narrative quilts are known to survive today, and each is a celebrated national treasure. Her "Bible Quilt" (1886) is housed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, while the "Pictorial Quilt" (1898) resides at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Powers' distinctive style involved appliqué techniques with West African roots, using them to tell complex stories. While many 19th-century quilts focused on patterns, Powers' work was unique for its depiction of living creatures and narrative scenes from the Bible, folklore, and historical events. She first exhibited the "Bible Quilt" at an Athens, Georgia, cotton fair in 1886, where it captivated a local artist and teacher named Jennie Smith. Powers initially refused to sell her creation, which she called "the offspring of my brain," but facing financial hardship four years later, she sold it to Smith for just five dollars. The "Pictorial Quilt" was a commissioned piece. After seeing the "Bible Quilt" exhibited again, a group of faculty wives from Atlanta University asked Powers to create another quilt as a gift for a university trustee. Beyond biblical scenes like the Last Supper, Powers' quilts also chronicled contemporary and celestial events. One panel on her "Pictorial Quilt" records the spectacular Leonid meteor shower of 1833, an event so intense that many who witnessed it feared it signaled Judgment Day. For enslaved people, quilting was a vital means of preserving history and culture when written records were forbidden or impossible. The craft served as a communal activity and a powerful medium for storytelling, passing down oral histories and cultural traditions from one generation to the next.
