Routed West Quilt Exhibit Opens at the National Museum of Women in the Arts

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 18:44:24 GMT

Sept. 18, 2026–Jan. 17, 2027, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC.

Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California "traces the flow and flourishing of quilts 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 in search of a more equitable life. Many of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who arrived in California carried quilts for warmth and protection, as containers for ancestral memory, and as emblems of cultural survival."

Baltimore Applique Society Baltimore Applique Society Blog

Routed West Quilt Exhibit Opens at the National Museum of Women in the Arts