Viola Canady

This Cathedral Window Quilt was designed and created by quilter Viola Canady, (November 3, 1922 - March 21, 2009).

She used brightly colored African batik and printed fabrics set in black cloth—creating the effect of a stained-glass window.

This piece visually honors the communities around African American religious practices and quilting traditions.

Quilt Location: Collection
of the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum.

Viola Canady was born on November 3, 1922, to Charlie Williams and Lillie Grady. She grew up in Goldsboro, North Carolina. Around the age of 18, she moved to Washington, D.C. in 1945.

Viola Canady worked for the Department of the Army as a tailor/fitter for 19 years before retiring. She even sewed the decorations on General MacArthur’s uniform.

Canady often applied her skill to spiritual themes and used quilting to build community.

She founded the Daughters of Dorcas and Sons, a Washington, D.C., quilting guild to teach and share quilting in local schools, hospitals and civic centers.

On Saturday, March 21, 2009; the beloved wife of the late Clifton Canady; loving mother of Vernon Canady and Beverly Canady Swilley also survived by three grandsons; Eric, Troy and Brandon, died.

Source for image of quilt: https://anacostia.si.edu/collec.../object/acm_1995.5009.0003
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Below is a 1996 interview Viola Canady did with the NYT.

Life's Thread Stitched Into Quilts
By Patricia Leigh Brown / NYT
April 4, 1996

EVEN now, seven decades away from her North Carolina girlhood, Virginia Hall has a fondness for Wednesday nights. For it was on fall and winter Wednesdays that Mrs. Hall, a sharecropper's daughter who now lives in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, would gather around the large wooden frame in the living room with her mother and her mother's friends, fortified by laughter, fried chicken and hot buttery cake.

It was quilting time. "You'd be feeling so joyous and comfortable in the house," Mrs. Hall said, recalling how she loved to sneak under the quilt, which was stretched on thin poles, called horses, balanced on chairs. "I liked being around my mother, so I'd go under it. It was nice and warm."

Today, with a growing legion of African-American quilters, from Brooklyn to Detroit, Mrs. Hall is creating a more universal frame. She founded the Southern African-American Quilters, an informal group of kindred stitchers, most of them retired, who meet twice a month at the neighborhood library to teach quilting -- perhaps one of the most enduring African-American artistic traditions -- to a new generation of women.

"It's about people getting together, enjoying each others' company, do you know what I'm saying?" she said the other day, sitting at her dining-room table quilting with friends. "In my mind a quilt absolutely tells a story. It's always about a group of people. They're quilting, but they also have a fellowship talking. The quilt speaks to you like a painting. The spirit of a person makes it warm."

That spirit was on abundant display last week at the Calvary Episcopal Church in northeast Washington, where members of the Daughters of Dorcas & Sons, another largely African-American quilting group, were busy resurrecting the quilting bee. (By their seam rippers ye shall know them.)

Bessie M. Sharpe, born in 1906, fondly remembered combing the batting, or raw field cotton that she picked as a child, for "filling" -- "beating it with a big wooden comb till it was flat." Like many African-American women in cities all over the country, she has recently begun quilting again, starting with a traditional britches quilt made of old blue jeans.

"After I got grown and thought I knew everything, I left quilting," Bertha Morgan, another reborn quilter, said. Mrs. Morgan, a retired Defense Department photographer and native Mississippian, now fashions new quilts from cherished bits of her grandmothers' dresses and from buttons saved in a family "button book." "They tell you what they did, what they wore, make you feel what they went through," she said. "They give you the history of your family."

The circle of African-American quilters is widening nationally among older women, for whom quilting was a rural necessity, as well as among younger urban women weaned on store-bought blankets and central heating.

In Cincinnati, Carolyn Mazloomi, 45, an aerospace engineer turned gifted quilter, founded the Women of Color Quilter's Network in 1985, which now has nine chapters and 1,100 members nationwide. Many of her members specialize in narrative quilts on contemporary African-American themes because, she said, "we are a people with many stories to tell."

In Detroit, the Wednesday Quilting Sisters meet weekly at the Hartford Memorial Baptist Church, reinterpreting traditional country quilts using West African motifs. In Philadelphia, Betty Leacraft has been teaching quilting to women in prison.

The Daughters of Dorcas & Sons is named for a seamstress in the New Testament who made clothes for the poor. (They added "& Sons" after three men joined the organization.) It is the oldest African-American quilting group, founded 16 years ago by Viola V. Canady, a retired Army seamstress, whose quilted angel's wings shimmer with tiny, gold-thread stitches. At the time, Mrs. Canady recalled, "I couldn't find find any black people who quilted." She continued. "Most of the women I'd ask didn't want to quilt because they connected it with poverty, with the country, when everybody had to sleep on quilts."

Mrs. Canady, who was born in Goldsboro, N.C., and moved to Washington in 1945, persevered, convinced that without those tenuous bits of cloth a vital link would disappear. "We have lost so very much of what our people did," she said. "Quilting is what we were about. If you wanted to stay warm, you had to quilt."

Quilting is by no means strictly an African-American phenomenon. But it has special historical resonance. "Within the African-American community, the quilt is perhaps the single most important image families have created for several centuries, and often the most lasting and permanent," said Dr. William Ferris, the director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.

"Quilts connect to memory and constitute a bond between generations," he added. "They have roots in African culture, where quilt making and textiles are important. But they are critical to African-American history because much of the history of black culture has not been written down. Oral tradition and the world of the quilt constitute the most important record we have of black families."

Virginia Hall of Bedford-Stuyvesant started quilting at 7. Whenever she thinks about a quilt, she thinks of her mother, Gerti DeBreaux, and sees her face. In her kitchen she has a refrigerator magnet that says, "When life goes to pieces, try quilting."

The quilts of her girlhood in Northampton County, North Carolina, stitched from spare sleeves, corduroys and overalls, were "like iron," she recalled, as she worked on "cathedral window" patches with Jane Green and Rhoda Hunt. "They were heavy! We loved the weight of those quilts. The fresh air was coming in from everywhere in that house, but in those quilts no air could come in. We could hardly turn."

When a quilt wore out, you added layers. "It was, 'Don't throw this out, don't throw that out, we can save that,' " Mrs. Hall said. "My mother was very talented. She could take a chicken breast and cut six or seven pieces out of it. She could take nothing and make something. She knew how to put things together."

The family lived in a wood frame house hoisted on stilts to keep out the rain. The quilts were stuffed with field cotton picked by the family, including Virginia, whose shoulders often blistered in the sun.

Mrs. Hall: "You'd beat that cotton until it was nice and fluffy."

Mrs. Green: "Picking it was the hard part." Mrs. Green recalls washing quilts in a four-legged iron pot in the family home in Virginia, then spreading it over a fence or on shrubbery to dry. She remembers how clean it smelled.

Quilts embodied a sense of community. "Men, especially church folks, would help you paint the house -- build the frame," Mrs. Hall said. "Friends talked over the fences because there were no phones. If someone had string beans or collard greens, they'd come over the fence and say, 'How you doing?' They shared. People would talk about stitching. It was about a lot more than a quilt."

When she was 18, Mrs. Hall left the South, romanticizing it not a bit. She hated the dew, which made her feet itch. She loathed outhouses and snakes. She couldn't stand the way the white children rode the bus to school while the black children walked.

She moved to Brooklyn and began her long professional life, first as a baby sitter and then as a diamond inspector, before taking up quilting again. It took her five years to create her free-form "God" quilt, hundreds of colored patches, representing the earth's people, radiating from the word "God" in the center. "You have to be ready to come sit down," she said of quilting. "It's, 'Let's talk, let's sing.' It's a therapy. It's quieting to the mind."

Quilting is by nature a communal art, noted Dr. Raymond G. Dobard, a fine arts professor at Howard University and a member of the Daughters of Dorcas. He keeps his quilting materials in a tackle box (he said that until they added "& Sons," it was "Ladies! Ladies! And Raymond!").

"It has historically provided women an opportunity to come together to work, exchange ideas and share in each others troubles," Dr. Dobard said. In times of social fragmentation, it offers an antidote, common ground. "In many ways," he added, "quilting is a healing art."

Today, the quilter's living room may be the church basement, the local library or the center for the elderly. "In anonymous urban settings," said Steve Zeitlin, a folklorist with Citylore, a nonprofit New York urban folklore organization, "the quilters make a connection, as if through sewing they stitch themselves with one another."

While many older women like Mrs. Hall remain traditionalists, many younger quilters, like Barbara Brown, 45, of Odenton, Md., a former lawyer, are devoting their quilts to contemporary African-American issues and themes. She is adding a section on civil rights to a story quilt she designed for the film "How to Make an American Quilt," "because my story does not end with slavery," she said.

Many quilters in the Women of Color Quilter's Network are creating appliqued, African-American art quilts, which depict political events, from Nelson Mandela's release from prison to the Million Man March. Julia Richardson-Pate, a Michigan quilter, has made a memorial quilt dedicated to her son Theron, who died at 20 of a cerebral hemorrhage, incorporating photographic transfers, from her son's first drawing to their last Christmas snapshots.

At the weekly Daughters of Dorcas meeting, Iradell Thomas showed off her "Family Album" quilt, in which family photographs are incorporated in the quilt. The group recently helped a group of sixth-grade boys design a quilt about famous black men, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Collectively, these quilters are redefining tradition. The definition of an African-American quilt has been the subject of scholarly debate in recent years. Some historians have interpreted it strictly as a Southern rural utilitarian quilt, based strictly on "remembered" African precedents. Cuesta Benberry, a quilter and historian in St. Louis, has a simpler definition: "An African-American quilt," she said, "is one made by an African-American."

As it was with the work of their mothers and grandmothers, the bits of cloth will become heirlooms, tethered to tomorrow's history (each time Frances Boyd, 78, a Daughter of Dorcas member, finishes a quilt, she puts it in her will).

And if the banter around Mrs. Hall's table is any indication, quilting contributes to longevity.

Mrs. Green: "Why do men pass first?"

Mrs. Hunt: "They don't quilt."

Sitting in the church basement in Washington finishing her Hawaiian floral, Mrs. Morgan spoke for many generations of her family. "It strengthens you, gives you the little bit of oomph you need to carry on," she said of quilting. "It tells you: 'You can't quit now. You've come too far.' "

The Quilter's Art

QUILTING FESTIVAL, sponsored by American Craft Museum and the Women of Color Quilter's Network, April 13 and 14; 40 West 53d Street, (212) 956-3535.

Daughters of Dorcas & Sons will give quilting workshops, 9:30 A.M. to noon on April 13 and 20, as part of "Made by Men: African-American Traditional Quilts," University of Maryland Art Gallery, 1202 Art-Sociology Building, College Park; (301) 405-2763. Through April 21.

"An American Treasury: Quilts from the Museum of American Folk Art," Columbus Avenue and 65th Street, May 4 to Sept. 8, includes African-American quilts. Cuesta Benberry and Maude Southwell Wahlman will lecture at a June 1 symposium. Information: (212) 977-7298.

Women of Color Quilter's Network, 556 Bessinger Drive, Cincinnati 45240, acts as a clearinghouse. Fax: (513) 825-9791.

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A version of this article appears in print on April 4, 1996, Section C, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: Life's Thread Stitched Into Quilts.
-End Article-

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About the NYT Archive
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/04/garden/life-s-thread-stitched-into-quilts.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
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Here is the transcript of an oral history interview of Viola Canady by the Quilter's S.O.S. organization.

https://quiltalliance.org/projects/qsos/archive/

Quilters’ S.O.S. -- Save Our Stories (QSOS) is a grassroots oral history project created by the nonprofit Quilt Alliance that records, preserves, and shares the stories of living quiltmakers.

The Quilt Alliance (formerly The Alliance for American Quilts) was formed in 1993 by Shelly Zegart and Eunice Ray of the Kentucky Quilt Project, and Karey Bresenhan and Nancy O'Bryant, corporate officers of Quilts, Inc. and founders of the non-profit Texas Quilt Search.

In the fall of 1999, QSOS project was introduced by the Quilt Alliance and the International Quilt Festival.

QSOS was one of several Quilt Alliance projects and partnerships created in an effort to preserve and celebrate the lives and stories of quilters and quiltmaking.

Regional QSOS projects conducted interviews at quilt shows, guild meetings, and private homes across the country and around the world.

The project continued though 2016. As of November 2016 the collection includes interviews with all fifty US states, the United States Virgin Islands, and nine other countries represented including: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Georgia (Republic), Germany, Japan, Kenya, Peru, and Russia.

The QSOS oral history project is a partnership between the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, the Quilt Alliance, and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.