TOPIC:
Curating African American-made Quilts at BAMPFA

Elaine Y. Yau is associate curator of the African American quilt collection at BAMPFA, where she is organizing an exhibition from Eli Leon’s historic bequest of approximately 3,000 quilts for fall 2024. She co-curated Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective in 2020 with Larry Rinder, an exhibition that deepened her long-standing engagement with art at the intersection of discourses on folk art, vernacular culture, and modernism. She has published on Gertrude Morgan and Minnie Evans, and her critical essay on folk art was included in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History (2019). Her research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She received her doctorate in History of Art and Folklore from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015.