The Secret Codes: African Nova Scotian Quilts
The Secret Codes is a joyful, must-see exhibit celebrating culture, creativity and community in quilts and paintings by 25 Black Nova Scotian artists.
You can revel in the fascination of hot, pulsating colour; traditional and contemporary patterns, fabric choices and stitching techniques in quilts from the 20th and 21st centuries. But this is more than a quilt show.
It is a display of the history and evolution of a community rooted in the “secret codes” – the pictorial messages coded in blankets hung over porches to tell people escaping slavery in the 18th and 19th century where to go, how to manoeuvre, what to bring. A chart explains codes like the Drunkard’s Path (“use a zig-zag route … to confuse pursuing dogs, slave catchers”) or Flying Geese directing people north.
Curated by David Woods, the exhibit is a collaboration between the Black Artists Network of Nova Scotia (BANNS) and the Vale Quilters Association, a group of mainly Black women from New Glasgow’s Vale Road area. It is Nova Scotia’s only incorporated guild of Black quilters.
Woods produced a smaller version of this show in 2012 at the Public Archives’ Chase Gallery; it’s fascinating to see how the Vale Quilters have continued to produce powerful, original, pictorial work; the scale of Myla Borden’s 2022 Woman in the Yellow Dress (at roughly 9 feet tall by 6 feet wide) is as amazing as its punch of colour and pattern.
In the contemporary section the walls pulsate with bold colours – reds, yellows and blues – with a lot of black line in graphic images representing of Black history and community life, including a quilt of the Beechville church with its stained glass windows and parishioners. The are several striking works of larger-than-life women at work or play or in spiritual ecstasy; they appear as historic heroes or icons.
For many years David Woods, a poet, painter, play director and possibly a prophet, has stirred the pot – never turning down the heat – to discover and shine a light on the rich history of Black Nova Scotian arts and to foster the development of those arts. He has gone into communities knocking door to door find their stories and preserve their histories.
“The kids don’t stay in these communities,” he told Canadian Art’s Kelsey Adams in 2020 (Black History Decades – Canadian Art). “The old people get old. The churches rot. I’m not elevating these stories as anything more than what they are. It’s just that I understand these places. I travel these places. I talk to these people. And it would be great to just represent their stories before they completely expire.”
Woods gives this expanded version, to travel nationally, great context and cohesion and includes contemporary painting by artists including Justin Augustine, Leticia Fraser and Ibe Ananaba. These artists reference quilts and fabric as a material and a metaphor just as Woods’ small paintings, on display in a glass case, have been translated into fabric.
The exhibit includes a broadcast of the fascinating documentary, The Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend (2005), by Alabama Public Television (producer/director Celia Carey), a film that inspired Woods and Black quilters in Nova Scotia.
The film tells the story of the small, often impoverished, community on the Alabama River; its aging female quiltmakers, whose ancestors were slaves on a nearby plantation; and folk art collector William Arnett, who discovered their art and took it to the best museums in the United States. These women are defined by their faith, their reverence for their own history and culture, and their fine artistry.
Woods tried to get The Quilts of Gee’s Bend exhibit to Nova Scotia in 2006 when he was an associate curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. When the show was unavailable, he brought in works by two Gee’s Bend quilters, Marylee Bendolph and Louisiana Pettway, who toured Nova Scotian communities in the spring of 2007.
While this is more than a quilt show, there is plenty for a quilt lover to enjoy: a stunning Square in Square Variation c. 1960 like a modern abstract full of orange and diagonals by Susan Lawrence (1931-2008), of Upper Big Tracadie; the tufted, hand-pieced, candy pink and multi-coloured Five Star Pattern c. 1983 by Robyn Cain (North Preston); a 1970s Strip Quilt top (closest in intent and in its use of cast-off fabric to some of the Gee’s Bend work) by Edith Colley (1920-2014) , of East Preston, and the Sunshine and Shadow Log Cabin Quilt c. 1925 by Digby artist Frances “Fanny” Miller (1852-1933). This quilt has such a powerful rendition of shadow you’d swear there was sunlight shining right on it.
Sunshine and Shadow Log Cabin Quilt c.1925, Frances ‘Fanny’ Miller 1852 – 1933 (Digby), hand pieced and quilted; yarn tufted. (Collection of Black Loyalist Heritage Centre, Shelburne, NS) (Steve Farmer photo)
The next confirmed stop for The Secret Codes is the Textile Museum of Canada from Oct 28, 2023, to March 31, 2024.
The Dalhousie Art Gallery (www.artgallery.dal.ca) is open Wednesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m.
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NS reviews 
I loved this show Eliissa. Great review. Gay
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Great review. Great read as always. Thanks for sharing. / Anna
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