The NCCU Art Museum inaugurated the 2020–2021 academic school year with a virtual quilting exhibition featuring the works of North Carolina native Kimberley Pierce Cartwright. Cartwright is a quilter, folk art painter and entrepreneur who grew up in Hallsboro, NC. She began her artistic career as a quilter and painter in 2006.
As the child of a seamstress, she often had access to her mother’s scrap cloth materials that allowed her to produce hand-stitched dolls, as well as clothes for the dolls. This would encourage a lifelong love for sewing. She now sews regularly, producing one-of-a-kind and uniquely designed quilts, paintings, and mixed media projects that reflect her stance on social, political, and cultural issues.
Through the use of paint, reclaimed fabric, paper, and plastic, Cartwright explores topics of interest such as slavery, the African American Diaspora, the Civil Rights Movement, and Afro-Southern life in general. Cartwright exhibits her abilities through not only quilts, but the production of small whimsical fabric postcards, dolls, totems, and other items.