Proving doubters wrong: Michael Cummings, picturing parity

Monday night at the Swann Fine Art Gallery (East 25th Street), in conjunction with their auction of Black art that featured one of his quilts, Harlem artist Michael Cummings told 50 or so admirers something about his momentous journey.

- By MICHAEL HENRY ADAMS

Jean Garrett, Michael Cummings, and Lamerol Gatewood. Harlem quilt artist Michael Cummings. Harlem quilt artist Michael Cummings.

((Michael Henry Adams photos))

Born and educated in California, he earned a bachelor's in American art history at Empire College in Santa Rosa. First, though, determined to please them, he told Swann's Director of African American Art, Nigel Freeman, that he studied for two years to become the accountant of his parents’ dreams. After he decided he must make art, and that their suggestion of maintaining his creative output as just a hobby was impossible, his father responded, “Fine! But I won't support you.”

It was a high school field trip to an exhibition where he had seen Van Gogh's pulsating “Starry Night” that first made Cummings say to himself, “That's what I must make!” Initially working as a painter, constructing collages and shadow boxes, Cummings gradually, early in the 1970s, followed friends’ advice to do something different. Moving to New York, he also taught himself to quilt, studying the works of local quilt artists who, he said, were invariably women. He read everything he could find about this ancient domestic art form. Quilting, he learned, is deeply rooted in the African American experience out of a necessity — surviving by turning trash into treasure.

“Quilting was meant to keep you physically warm, simultaneously warming your soul, through the process of making objects to beautify your environment,” said Cummings.