Major show of African American quilts opening at BAMPFA

In the summer of 2018, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive got an unexpected phone call. The news at the other end of the line would be some of the biggest in the museum’s history.

A few weeks earlier, an Oakland man named Eli Leon had passed away at the age of 82. A retired psychotherapist, Leon had spent the latter half of his life pursuing a second career as a self-taught scholar of African American quilts. He assembled what is believed to be the world’s largest collection of these works, encompassing more than 3,000 quilts in total.

Unbeknownst to anyone at BAMPFA, Leon had bequeathed nearly all of this collection to the museum.

This monumental bequest (which BAMPFA formally accepted in 2019) transformed the museum into the world’s preeminent institutional holder of Afr