Quilting Time
Made in 1986
Romare Bearden, American, 1914-1988
Mosaic tesserae mounted on plywood
Founders Society Purchase with funds
from the Detroit Edison Company (1986.41)
© Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

"I never saw anyone playing music at a quilting bee—although the women would hum along to the tempos of their needles—but music has been so important in my life that I use its imagery often in my work."

—Romare Bearden


In creating the scene for Quilting Time, artist Romare Bearden considered his love of music and his memories of growing up in rural North Carolina as a boy. At the time, quilting was an important activity among African Americans. In the lower left, notice the basket containing salvaged scraps of fabric, which the two seated women use to sew into a new quilt.

Just as a quilt is made of smaller pieces of material, Quilting Time is a mosaic made of thousands of small pieces of colored glass. Bearden first made a detailed model of this mosaic using pieces of paper glued together, much like a collage. Then the model was given to a mosaicist near Venice, Italy, who produced, cut and glued the small tiles according to Bearden’s specifications. The artist and tile maker’s names appear in glass tile at the lower left.