Rosie Lee Tompkins

In 2019, as a bequest, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) acquired the Eli Leon Collection of almost 3,000 works by African-American quilt makers, including more than 500 works by Tompkins, which will find a permanent home at the museum. Drawing from the Eli Leon Collection, BAMPFA presented Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective. The exhibition, which opened February 19, 2020, closed prematurely due to COVID-19 shut-down, but not before The New York Times called it "a triumphal retrospective" that "confirms her standing as one of the great American artists–transcending craft, challenging painting and reshaping the canon."

Tompkins was found dead at her home in Richmond, California on Friday December 1, 2006. She died aged 70.

Works pieced by Tompkins include Tents of Armageddon Four Patch (1986), Three Sixes (1987), Half-Squares Put-Together (1988), Half-Squares Medallion (1986), Half-squares Four-patch (1986), and Put Together with Letter "F" (1985).

Despite the fact that she was a deeply private person and rarely sold her quilts, her work was discovered in 1985 by Eli Leon, an Oakland-based collector specializing in African-American quilts. Leon featured her work on the cover of the catalog for an exhibition he organized, Who'd A Thought It: Improvisation in African-American Quiltmaking, which debuted at the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum in 1987 and traveled for several years. Tompkins' quilts were featured in a solo exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in 1997, at Peter Blum Gallery in New York City in 2003, and at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont in 2007. They were also included in the 2002 Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art and have been shown at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC; one image is available on their web site. In 2016, her quilts were featured in an exhibition of five quilt artists at the Oakland Museum of California.

Tompkins, who had helped her mother make quilts as a child, began to quilt seriously about 1980, while making a living as a practical nurse in the Bay Area.[1] She said she believed God directed her hand and her art. Her abstract, improvisational compositions often had a personal significance: one of her more well-known works, "Three Sixes," involves three relatives whose birthdays include the number 6.

Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006) is the art pseudonym of Effie Mae Martin Howard, a widely-acclaimed African-American quiltmaker and fiber artist of Richmond, California. The New York Times called her "one of the great American artists," and her work "one of the century’s major artistic accomplishments." More than 500 works by Tompkins reside at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Born Effie Mae Martin, she was born September 6, 1936 to a sharecropping family in southeastern Arkansas. She was the oldest of 15 half-siblings, growing up working picking cotton and piecing quilts with her mother.