On the Cover: Mary Had a Baby

Abstract

On the CoverMary Had a Baby Stephen Towns Click for larger view View full resolution Natural and synthetic fabric, polyester and cotton thread, crystal glass beads. Courtesy of the artist. 47 × 36.75 in. 2020 Mary Had a Baby is from a series of story quilts called A Songbook Remembered. Ancestral music is at the heart of this series, a quilted collection of imagined historical narratives with imagery drawn directly from the poetry of African American spirituals. This work represents a deeply personal and emotional evolution within Towns’s quilting practice, as he turned to both spiritual music and the process of quilting as sources of comfort during the uncertainty of the covid-19 pandemic. Towns’s intricate stitchwork is guided by songs of joy, hope, resilience, and protest, and the creative process itself functioned, for the artist, as an act of remaining present in a time of chaos. Mary Had a Baby is inspired by the song that tells the biblical tale of how Mary conceived and raised Jesus to go on to do wonderful things. Te quilt draws from a plethora of portraits of Madonna and child works. In it, Madonna stares lovingly at her child who bears a red cross. Stephen Towns’s quilts can be seen in his traveling solo exhibition Declaration & Resistance at Reynolda House in Winston-Salem, NC from February 18 through May 14, 2023. Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press