To celebrate the opening of Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California, BAMPFA Associate Curator and Academic Liaison Elaine Yau offers a brief overview of the exhibition and shares the journey of organizing the show from over three thousand quilts in the museum collection.

Routed West traces the flow and flourishing of quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration. These quilts explore the medium’s unique capacity for connecting kin across time and space, holding memory and ancestral knowledge, and opening up space for beauty and ingenuity.