Yvonne Wells began quilting in 1979, nearly at the age of 40, for the reason most people begin quilting: to keep herself and her family warm. Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Wells was a schoolteacher at the time and entirely self-taught in her art. Her husband one day handed her a picture of a quilt clipped from the local Tuscaloosa newspaper and challenged her to re-create it.
She did so perfectly, igniting a deep spiritual calling that found her abandoning the conventions of the craft. Wells pieced unusual shapes and fabrics together. She attached buttons, yarn, zippers, snippets of text, and even police tape.
“My work is not traditional,” she has said. “If they tell me to make my stitches small and tight, I’ll leave them loose.” She added, “This is truly me: the unfinished, the unpolished.
” Now 84, Wells is considered a visionary on par with historical figures like the “Mad Potter” George Ohr and the quilt-maker Rosie Lee Tompkins. Her large-format quilts contain both the epic detail of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s paintings and the crude charm of all good outsider art. She has made pieces based on Proverbs and the Seven Deadly Sins, for the White House Christmas tree and the aids Memorial Quilt, and as backdrops for the concerts of Cicely Tyson, Harry Belafonte, James Earl Jones, and Sidney Poitier.
But she is best known for her narrative compositions depicting formative moments in Black history: the Middle Passage, the Great Migration, the civil-rights mov.