Alice Beasley

Alice Beasley was born in 1945, in Tuskegee, Alabama.^[1][2][3] Her family moved to Michigan when she was four years old; she grew up in Detroit.^[4]

Beasley attended Marygrove College in Detroit, earning a bachelor's degree in journalism in 1962.^[1][2][5] She worked for The Detroit News as an entertainment reporter.^[4] She later moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where she worked at the San Francisco Chronicle for approximately one year as a features reporter.^[4] Beasley attended University of California, Berkeley, earning her J.D. degree, with a specialty in civil rights litigation and constitutional law, in 1973.^[2][6]

Beasley started her own law firm with two friends after graduating from Berkeley.^[7] During her law career, she worked for the NAACP legal defense fund.^[8]

She began making art as a respite from her day job as an attorney.^[2] As she was "facile with fabric and also liked to draw,"^[7] she wondered if she could create portraits with fabric. She started quilting in 1988,^[7] her inspirations ranging from Modigliani, Vermeer, and Rembrandt to Chuck Close and Hung Liu.^[7] She began her career as a full-time quilt artist after her retirement from the legal profession in January 2007.^[1][4]

She has had her work displayed at the Joyce Gordon Gallery,^[7] Berkeley Art Center,^[9] Myrtle Beach Art Museum,^[10] the American Folk Art Museum,^[10] the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum,^[10] The Textile Museum in Washington D.C.,^[11] Los Medanos College,^[2] the Clinton Presidential Center,^[1][2] the Quilt National,^[12] the California Heritage Museum,^[13] Rutgers University Art Museum,^[13] the Featherstone Center for the Arts in Massachusetts,^[14] and abroad in Spain, France, Japan, Namibia, and Croatia.^[11]

The De Young Museum in San Francisco holds her work in their collection, as does the San Francisco Arts Commission and the County of Alameda.^[10] One of her works, A Meditation on Time, is in the permanent collection of the United States Embassy in Chad.^[15][16] She has done commissions for the Richmond California Housing Authority, Stanford University,^[17] and the Highland Hospital in Oakland.^[18]

She is a Juried Artist Member at the Studio Art Quilt Associates,^[19] and a member of the African American Quilt Guild of Oakland.^[8][20]

Beasley is known for her appliqué quilts, which she creates using commercial and hand-printed fabrics.^[8][21][22] Much of her work contains social or political commentary.^[8] Some of her work is not intended to be explicitly political in nature, but has been described as "highly politicized".^[8] On the topic of one of her portraits which depicts a young Black man, Beasley once said, “Frankly, anytime you are showing the humanity of a Black man these days, you are necessarily entering into a narrative that requires a movement just to expound the simple proposition that Black lives matter.”^[8]

Some of her artworks depict or commemorate historical figures, including Miles Davis,^[23] Thelton Henderson,^[23] Martin Luther King Jr.,^[24] Trayvon Martin,^[25] Barack Obama,^[23] Betty Reid Soskin,^[18] and Ida B. Wells.^[1] Other artworks reference historical events and movements, like Shelby County v. Holder,^[26] the Rwandan Civil War,^[27] and the African-American women's suffrage movement,^[1] as well as subjects in contemporary politics, such as the National Rifle Association of America, anti-Black racism, Black life in the United States, climate change, pollution, the impact of social media, and essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.^[8][24] One example of Beasley's commentary pieces is From Russia With Love (2017), which depicts Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump as the two embracing figures from The Kiss by Gustav Klimt.^[24] She has also created still lifes,^[28] landscapes,^[16] works about her family history,^[23][29] and portraits from her imagination.^[8][30]

Beasley was married to Dave Cohn from 2007 until his death in 2016.^[7][31] She lives in Piedmont, California, near Oakland.^[2]

• African-American art
• Black Lives Matter art
• Quilts of Gee's Bend
• Souls Grown Deep Foundation