For “Sunshine Joe” Mallard, quilting is both a personal inheritance and a way of recording the world around him. He traces his earliest connection to the practice to his great-great-grandmother, Mandy Green, who was born into slavery. When he was a child, she encouraged him not to worry about what others said he could not do, but to focus instead on what he could create. Years later, a television segment featuring Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier of the Los Angeles Rams doing needlework to relieve stress gave Mallard the confidence to begin quilting himself.

Mallard’s quilts often take shape over many years, gradually incorporating the events and moments that define a particular period. His first large-scale work records national and local events from the first twenty-one years of his youngest son’s life. Other works follow a similar structure, documenting political and social developments as they unfold. His Obama Tie Quilt, for example, chronicles the first term of President Barack Obama and is now part of the collection of the Obama Presidential Center Museum.

Hand embroidered with thousands of stitches and knots, Mallard’s quilts typically require four to five years to complete. The works in this exhibition reflect the artist’s sustained engagement with history as it happens, transforming lived experience, memory, and public events into richly detailed textile records.