“Quilting is a dynamic, evolving artform linking Africans in the diaspora and those on the continent. I honor tradition as I reshape it, paying homage while challenging convention. My needlework moves Black women’s legacy of the clothesline and onto museum walls.”

Erin LeAnn Mitchell is a textile artist from Birmingham, AL, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Master of Arts in Art Education from Columbia College Chicago. Her work extends the Southern quilting tradition, combining textiles and collage gathered from markets and fabric stores into multidimensional assemblages that render the realities of Southern Blackness into radical new imaginings.

Erin has exhibited at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Abroms-Engel Institute for Visual Arts, Kravets Wehby Gallery, FLXST Contemporary, The Other Art Fair, EXPO Chicago, Future Fair, FNB Art Joburg, Untitled Art, and on the nationally syndicated Fox series Empire. In 2019, she was commissioned to present a work to Dr. Angela Davis in honor of her humanitarian achievements by the Birmingham Committee for Truth and Reconciliation.

Hometown
Birmingham, AL