West Chester quilter named United States Artists Fellow

United States Artists is pleased to announce its 2021 USA Fellows. This year, 60 artists across ten creative disciplines will receive unrestricted $50,000 cash awards. The award honors their creative accomplishments and supports their ongoing artistic and professional development. The 2021 USA Fellows class is the largest in the organization’s 15-year history. USA Fellowships are awarded to artists at all stages of their careers and from all areas of the country through a rigorous nomination and panel selection process. Fellowships are given in the following categories: Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing.

Among these esteemed 2021 fellows is West Chester quilter Dr. Carolyn L. Mazloomi.

Each of USA’s 2021 Fellows receives $50,000 in unrestricted funds, supplemented by financial advising programs to help Fellows maximize the benefit of this prize. The USA Fellowship is the organization’s flagship program and is central to its mission of believing in artists and their essential role in our society.

Mazloomi is in great company across culture. Fellows span every career stage and hail from 22 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. They represent the storytellers, shapemakers, movement builders, and culture bearers who shape today. 

Trained as an aerospace engineer, Mazloomi turned her efforts in the 1980s to bring the many unrecognized contributions of African American quilt artists to the attention of the American people as well as the international art communities.

A major force as an artist in her own right, Mazloomi’s quilts have been exhibited extensively in venues such as the Mint Museum, American Folk Art Museum in New York City, National Civil Rights Museum, Museum of Art and Design, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Her pictorial narrative quilts make plain her personal themes: family life, women’s rights, political freedom, and musical legacy. Her quilts have been included in over 74 exhibits and she herself has curated 21 extensive exhibits of quilts made by members of the Women of Color Quilters Network, many of them traveling exhibits.

Mazloomi has been the recipient of many state and national honors, including the 2003 Ohio Heritage Fellowship Award, the first such award for any Ohio citizen. In 2014 she was named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest award given in the United States for traditional arts. In 2014 she was awarded the Distinguished Scholar & Celebrated Artist Lifetime Achievement Award by Faith Ringgold’s Anyone Can Fly Foundation. Dr. Mazloomi was the 2016 inductee to the Quilters Hall of Fame Museum.