Craft: An American History

by Glenn Adamson

Ruth Clement Bond. Born in 1904 to a minister’s family in Louisville, she had managed to study English to master’s level—rare for a Black woman at the time—and by the early 1930s was department head at Kentucky State College. When her husband was appointed as the TVA’s highest-ranking African American official, however, the couple moved down to Alabama so that he could direct construction projects there. Bond launched into a parallel effort focused on home improvement. Dismayed that former sharecroppers “were buying things they didn’t need, yet weren’t fixing up their houses,” she helped local women make curtains from dyed feed sacks and rugs woven from corn husks.51 Many of Bond’s new acquaintances were quilters, so she also made patterns for them to execute, cutting out templates in brown paper. To some extent, her designs resemble standard posters promoting New Deal values of progress and modernization. But they also have a stylistic affinity with art of the Harlem Renaissance and are thematically focused on African American uplift. Because one of the key goals of the TVA was to build a hydroelectric dam, she created a quilt (now lost) depicting a full-length figure with his hands upstretched, clasping a lightning bolt—“instead of the banjo he would normally hold,” as she put it—and another (which does survive) showing a Black fist grasping red lightning, with an American flag and a shining sun above. When students assigned to the TVA from Fisk and Tennessee State saw t...