We are pleased to share that Stitching Love and Loss: A Gee’s Bend Quilt by Lisa Gail Collins has been awarded the 2023 Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize from the Bard Graduate Center. The prize rewards scholarly excellence and commitment to cross-disciplinary conversation in books about decorative arts, design history, or material culture of the Americas.
With sincerity and empathy, Collins has crafted a book [that] will help readers appreciate local Black vernacular culture in rich and nuanced ways.
Horowitz Book Prize selection committee members
A moving meditation on a singular quilt, Stitching Love and Loss illuminates the perseverance and creativity of the African American women quilters in a rural Black Belt community.
“The quilts of Gee’s Bend are rightly renowned, subject of wildly popular exhibits in the early 2000s and more recently the distribution of quilts of Gee’s Bend into major museum collections,” wrote the members of the selection committee for the Horowitz Book Prize. “Collins is intentional in locating the story not in the value put on Gee’s Bend quilts by those outside the community . . . Rather she embeds the quilts in the community life in Gee’s Bend, Alabama. With sincerity and empathy, Collins has crafted a book [that] will help readers appreciate local Black vernacular culture in rich and nuanced ways.”
Lisa Gail Collins is Professor of Art and Director of American Studies on the Sarah Gibson Blanding Chair at Vassar College. Her books include The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past and New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (coedited with Margo Natalie Crawford).
In recognition of her outstanding contributions to the field, Bard Graduate Center will host an event with Collins on the subject of the book in the fall of 2025.
University of Washington Press Blog 