Nora Ezell, 90; quilter won National Heritage Fellowship

LOS ANGELES - Anybody who asked Nora Ezell what inspired the scenes in her narrative quilts probably heard her usual response:

"I grab things off the top of my head and run with 'em," she often said. "I can't tell you no more. I just do it."

Anybody who saw Ms. Ezell's quilts learned the rest. The quilts speak about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, the civil rights era in Alabama, the saga of the American Indian.

Installed in museums and private collections, the hand-sewn quilts are history, rendered in cloth and thread. They are a record too, of the life of the artist who sewed her memories, values and vision - "a part of me," she often said - in every quilt.

Ms. Ezell, whose quilts won her a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1992, died Sept. 6 from complications of heart disease in Tuscaloosa, Ala., at the home of a granddaughter. She was 90.

"Nora didn't invent the narrative quilt, but I think she really made a significant contribution to that form," said Gail Andrews, director of the Birmingham Museum of Art and a longtime friend. "She had a great way of communicating a story, a personality, an event."

And her quilts were bold statements of creative freedom. A self-taught artist, Ms. Ezell used mixed media, vibrant colors, and often worked without patterns.

Not all of Ms. Ezell's quilts were the pictorial narrative or story-telling quilts, which include renderings of people, places, and things, done in cloth and other materials. But all of the work embodies her unique aesthetic.

"She would take something very traditional and then make it her own," said Joey Brackner, folklorist for the Alabama State Council on the Arts. Quilting was woven into all the other parts of Ms. Ezell's life: marriage, motherhood, work, spirituality.

Ms. Ezell was born in Brooksville, Miss., on June 24, 1917, one of 10 children, and moved with her family to Alabama at a young age. Her mother was an expert seamstress who taught her daughters to sew their own clothes.

In those early days Ms. Ezell learned that quilts could be made from scraps of anything; an aunt made hers from feed and flour sacks, and stuffed them with cotton salvaged from the fields they worked.

Married at an early age, Ms. Ezell had one daughter, Annie Ruth Phillips. After her first husband died, and her daughter was grown, Ms. Ezell remarried and moved to Paterson, N.J., where for years she worked in sewing factories, making drapery, upholstery, lingerie, and other clothing. On the side, she continued quilting.

In 1979, after Ms. Ezell's daughter was diagnosed with cancer, Ms. Ezell and her husband moved to Greene County, Ala., to be near her. One day at a craft fair, the two women saw a story-telling quilt that sparked their interest. Eventually mother and daughter began a quilt illustrating the life of King.

"She taught me a lot about colors," Ms. Ezell said of her daughter. "She could see so straight, she would help me get seams and cut pieces very straight, which is very important in making a quilt."

But Ms. Ezell's daughter never had an opportunity to see the finished King quilt; she died in 1984. Devastated, Ms. Ezell could no longer work on the quilt. When she returned to the project, it took her two years to finish.

In making the quilt, Ms. Ezell drew upon her memories of the civil rights era, as she would for other quilts. In 1986 the King quilt was included in a national exhibition called "Stitching Memories: African American Story Quilts," organized by Williams College in Massachusetts.

The exhibition was a turning point for Ms. Ezell. Later she received commissions, her work received gallery and museum showings, and her acclaim grew. And Ms. Ezell was the recipient of the 1990 Alabama Folk Heritage Award.

Her quilts, which sold for about $7 in the 1950s, were considered art worth thousands of dollars each by the 1990s.

Along with the struggles of completing a quilt, Ms. Ezell, like 19th-century women diarists, also wrote "about her health, her house, an errant grandchild," Andrews, the Birmingham Museum of Art's director, said.

Although her journal was written for her family, it was published in 1999 by Black Belt Press as "My Quilts and Me, The Diary of An American Quilter."

Ms. Ezell was as candid and feisty in her writing as she was in person, speaking about her faith in God, and the difficulties of her craft, and of aging.

Until shortly before her death, she was still quilting, "cutting the grass . . . fixing a leak; you name it, she could claim it," said Beverly Smith, one of her grandchildren.

Although Ms. Ezell worried about workmanship and waning energy, she never seemed to run short of themes for her narrative quilts. Life had offered a sufficient supply: "I have so many memories of the civil rights movement," she often said, "I could make a quilt from Birmingham to Selma."

"I always loved that: from Birmingham to Selma," Andrews said. "I can see her quilting all the way."

In addition to Smith, Ms. Ezell leaves six siblings, three other grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren, and 11 great-great-grandchildren.