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Someone Drew on the Harriet Powers Pictorial Quilt!!! (and didn't get in trouble!)

The information in this article comes from the 10th episode of the Six Know-It-Alls Masterpiece Quilts, on December 8, 2021. Kyra Hicks who is an independent scholar of quilts, a self-publishing author and writes a blog called Black Threads, was the person who talked about the Harriet Powers quilt.


First, a little bit about Harriet Powers from Wikipedia:

"Harriet Powers was an American folk artist and quilt maker. She was born into slavery in rural Georgia. She used traditional appliqué techniques to record local legends, Bible stories, and astronomical events on her quilts. Only two of her quilts are known to have survived: Bible Quilt 1886 and Pictorial Quilt 1898. Her quilts are considered among the finest examples of nineteenth-century Southern quilting. Her work is on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts.”


Kyra Hicks has been studying these two quilts for quite some time. She was talking about the Pictorial Quilt mainly in this segment. She found that it was made for the Rev. Charles Hall who was Chairman of the Board of the Trustees of Atlanta University. It was then passed to the eldest son of Charles, the Rev. Basil Hall after he passed away. There the quilt was tacked to a wall in one of the bedrooms of Rev. Basil Hall’s home, Synton House, in Westpoint, MA. He has a grandson and granddaughter. When Kyra Hicks went to visit the home Synton House, she met Robert Utter, the grandson, and he told her an unknown story how he and his little sister took a Bic ink pen and made little curly cue eyelashes on one of the pictures in the quilt.


If you ever see the quilt in person, you will see the tack holes where the quilt was hung and the little curly cue eyelashes that these little children drew on Harriet Powers Pictorial Quilt.

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