Alice Beasley – Quilts Exhibition

The California Heritage Museum is pleased to present a 30 year retrospective by Oakland quilt artist Alice Beasley. The exhibition will open on Friday, March 11th and conclude on Sunday, June 12th , 2022, open Wednesday to Sunday from 11am to 4pm. There will be a MEET THE ARTIST event on Saturday, March 12th from 2:00 – 5:00 P.M. There is FREE parking for this event directly behind the Heritage Museum’s building.
Quilt artist Alice Beasley has been making quilts since 1988. Fabric is her chosen medium of expression through which she creates realistic portraits of people and objects. She finds color, light, shadow, line and value in the pattern of ordinary household fabrics. From these materials she snips small pieces which she arranges and fuses into a figurative composition. As such the work grows from within rather than being applied to the surface of a canvas by paint, pencil or similar drawing tools. When the image is complete, Beasley sews it together with the stich line constituting the final ”drawn” line.
Ms. Beasley presents many subjects in her work, among them she often completes artwork that displays a rare look into the world of politics and how it affects the Black community. Ultimately, the artist’s goal is to celebrate the human condition in work that both intrigues and inspires the viewer.
Alice Beasley’s work has been exhibited in many venues throughout the United States including the California Heritage Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, Rutgers University Art Museum, the National Afro-American Museum, the Textile Museum of Washington D.C. and the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum as well as abroad in Madrid, France, Japan and Namibia. Her work has been purchased or commissioned by a number of individuals and public entities including the DeYoung Museum, the City and County of San Francisco and County of Alameda.