Winter 1980

"Hands" Quilt

American, 1916 - 2000

Inspired by the success of her aunt Pecolia Warner, whose quilts were exhibited in a 1977 Smithsonian traveling exhibition on southern folk arts, Sarah Mary Taylor of Yazoo City, Mississippi, began making appliqué quilts in 1979. Taylor employed a bold color palette and organized her designs to highlight the interaction of one color with another. She created her appliqué quilts block by block, often sewing the blocks to strips of pieced fabric. For this quilt she traced her left hand on a sheet of brown paper, which she then used as a pattern, cutting the shapes from old dresses. Taylor later produced other versions of this quilt, one of which was commissioned for the 1985 film The Color Purple.