Ora Clay

My mother, Minner Lampley, quilted out of necessity. The winters were very cold in Alabama, where I grew up. Our house had no insulation, and there were cracks in the walls and windows. It was a big deal when my mother finished a new quilt and placed it on top of the older ones. The quilts were heavy, and their weight made me feel safe and warm. 

On the farm, everything was time-consuming and labor-intensive. The cotton my family grew was planted in the spring and had to be weeded constantly to allow the plants to grow — and my mother used some of the very cotton we grew to make her quilts. For this part of her quilt making process, she would stretch out, by hand, the sections of the cotton bolls to make a layer of batting. For the backing, she pieced together flour sacks. The quilt tops were made from clothes we had outgrown. When a quilt was finished, it was fun to point out the scraps that came from a shirt, dress, or blouse that one of us six children used to wear. With her quilts, my mother practiced “recycling” before it was a common word. 

In 2011, my daughter took me to a class taught by master art quilter Marion Coleman at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD). Meeting Marion changed my life. She said that art quilts are story quilts and we all have a responsibility to tell our own story. In my first quilt, while working with Marion, I turned a Courthouse Steps – I’m not sure what this means variation of the Log Cabin blocks into a story quilt about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, the famous 1954 school desegregation case. That quilt is now part of the Smithsonian collection in Washington, DC. 

Since those first quilts, I have done over 100 quilting projects. I have learned to use quilts to tell a story by integrating such things as photos, sayings, and events from my cultural background. My quilts have been exhibited dozens of times, domestically and internationally.  

For more information visit quilts-by-ora.com
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