Ruth Elizabeth Bond

Ruth Clement Bond, an educator and civic leader who in the mid-1930's, in her first and only foray into quilt design, helped transform the American quilt from a utilitarian bedcovering into a work of avant-garde social commentary, died on Oct. 24 at her daughter's home in Manhattan. She was 101.

Her death was confirmed by her family.

Mrs. Bond was noted for a series of quilts known collectively as the T.V.A. quilts. Designed by her, the quilts were sewn in rural Alabama by the wives of African-American workers building dams there for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Visually arresting and contemporary-looking even today, the T.V.A. quilts are considered pivotal in the history of American quiltmaking.

While most quilts of the period were based on the traditional geometric and floral designs that had endured for more than a century, the T.V.A. quilts are dynamic works of modern art. Using solid-colored fabrics appliqu?onto stark backgrounds, they depict bold, stylized silhouettes of black people. With their jagged yet elegant lines, the figures have been compared to the paper cutouts of Matisse and to the work of the Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas.

Mrs. Bond, who had trained as an academic and did not know how to quilt, embarked on the project after her husband was sent to northern Alabama to supervise the black workers at the dam sites there. The Bonds lived for a time near the Wheeler Dam, in one of the segregated villages built for the workers and their families.

The women completed a half-dozen large quilts, all believed to have been made in 1934. Three are extant, as are several very small quilts, made as samples.

The T.V.A. quilts have been exhibited in New York at the Museum of Arts and Design, and elsewhere around the country. They are featured in several books, among them Soft Covers for Hard Times: Quiltmaking and the Great Depression (Rutledge Hill Press, 1990), by Merikay Waldvogel.

In later years, Mrs. Bond, whose husband joined the Foreign Service in 1944, taught at universities in Haiti, Liberia and Malawi and worked with women's and youth groups in Afghanistan, Tunisia and Sierra Leone. After returning to Washington in the 1960's, she served as president of the African-American Women's Association.

In 1978, Mrs. Bond was part of a fact-finding mission for the National Council of Negro Women that studied the role of women in Senegal, Togo and the Ivory Coast.

Ruth Elizabeth Clement was born in Louisville, Ky., on May 22, 1904, the fourth of seven children of a prominent black family. Her father, George, was a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Her mother, the former Emma Williams, was, in 1946, the first black woman to be named American Mother of the Year.

Ruth received bachelor's and master's degrees in English literature from Northwestern University and was afterward the head of the English department at Kentucky State College.

In 1931, she married J. Max Bond and followed him to the University of Southern California, where he earned a doctorate in sociology. Mrs. Bond also started work on a Ph.D., but left after the birth of her first child. Mr. Bond later took a position with the T.V.A., becoming the highest-ranking black administrator there.

Mr. Bond died in 1991. Mrs. Bond is survived by their three children, Jane Clement Bond and J. Max Bond Jr., both of Manhattan, and George Clement Bond of Teaneck, N.J.; a sister, Emma Clement Walker, of Seattle; six grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

When Mrs. Bond joined her husband in Alabama, she planned to finish her doctoral studies, but there was no local university at which she could enroll. So, while her husband trained the builders, she went to work with their wives in the makeshift villages along the Tennessee River.

Many of the workers were former sharecroppers, and the dam project gave them their first real income. Almost overnight, their wives were buying pianos for their parlors. But to Mrs. Bond's consternation, they were wallpapering those parlors with the pages of the Sears catalog.

These country women were buying things they didn't need, yet weren't fixing up their houses, she said in 1992, in an oral history for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.

Mrs. Bond started a home beautification program, helping the women make curtains from dyed feed sacks and rugs from cornhusks. Many of the women were expert quilters, and she began designing pictorial quilts that celebrated black Americans' expanded opportunities under the New Deal. Mrs. Bond cut the pattern pieces out of paper and chose the colors; the women pieced and quilted the cotton fabric.

One quilt depicts a man torn between an alluring woman, tantalizingly glimpsed at one edge of the image, and a solid government job, represented by an extended uniformed arm, at the other.

Another shows a black fist seeming to rise straight from the earth. The fist clutches a jagged red lightning bolt, symbolizing the T.V.A.'s promise of rural electrification.

The women called the quilt Black Power.

Source:: [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05EED9133EF930A257...]