“People of the World” (1979), by Lillian Beattie
Lillian Beattie didn’t make her first quilt until she was 60 years old. She had traveled to the 1939 New York World’s Fair and noticed that of all the quilts in a quilting exhibition, not one had people in them. That’s when she decided to start making her own.
“She thought that they needed to have figures in them to make them more dynamic and beautiful,” says Candace Adelson, senior curator of fashion and textiles at the Tennessee State Museum.
Eagle Quilt (1808) by Rebecah Foster
One of Beattie’s quilts, called “People of the World,” is part of the museum’s Between the Layers: Art and Story in Tennessee Quilts exhibition — a collection curated by Adelson that includes more than 400 quilts, one of which dates back as far as the late 1700s. The exhibit runs until July 7.
The quilt from Beattie, who was of Portuguese and Cherokee descent, includes brightly colored compositions of figures from comics, history and popular culture — Charlie Chaplin, Snoopy, George Washington — appliqued on a bright-yellow background. Adelson isn’t quite sure when Beattie started the quilt, but there’s a character in the top-left corner wearing bell-bottoms, so she’s fairly certain Beattie worked on it in the 1970s. She always sewed Washington from behind, Adelson explains, because she never could figure out how to make his face look right.
There were quilts with people in them before Beattie started, Adelson says, but none as unique and artistic as what Beattie came up with. And she didn’t use a traditional quilting method.
“She would make the front and appliqué the figures and then just attach it to the pre-quilted backing,” Adelson says. “She was known as a folk artist, basically, and really only became known — her quilts were in demand — after her death.”
Dutch Tulip pattern quilt (1897-1902), by Frances Mary “Fannie” Powers
Beattie finished the quilt that’s on exhibit in 1979, when she was 100 years old. (She was 109 when she passed away.) She was born in Athens, Tenn., and spent most of her life in Chattanooga, caring for the elderly. The collection at the Tennessee State Museum includes quilts from 72 of Tennessee’s 95 counties.
“It’s really a tribute to the art of quilting that it is so ubiquitous in Tennessee and elsewhere,” Adelson says. “It’s remarkable, too, because this art was traditionally women’s work, and we know that they were making them in every single county. Quilts were, and are, everywhere.”
