We’ve waited a long time for a glimpse at the true scope of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s African American quilt collection. When Eli Leon’s bequest to the museum was announced in late 2019, “nearly 3,000 works” was such a staggering number that it was difficult to appreciate just what it would look like to display this unexpected bounty. (The museum only learned about Leon’s gift after his death in 2018.)

Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California, the second BAMPFA exhibition drawn from the Leon collection, after the transcendent Rosie Lee Tompkins show in 2020, demonstrates that Tompkins may have been a prolific favorite (Leon collected over 500 works by her), but not an outlier.

Routed West is, in a word, dazzling.

The exhibition is loo

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