The Quilt Project:
Exhibition & Live Oak

A Legacy

The Quilts of Mrs. Gussie Beatrice Arnold Hill are both discovery and exploration of a contemporary artist with a depth of creativity, talent, and artwork. Its significance is the history portrayed through the viewing of these artifacts and relevance of their patterns, textile materials, batting, and stitching. The quilts are a living legacy of the trials and accomplishments of African American and Native American cultures and traditions, as well as the Africanist presence within the pieces.

Mrs. Gussie Beatrice Arnold Hill

The Exhibition: The Quilts of Mrs. Gussie Beatrice Arnold Hill

The Quilts of Mrs. Gussie Beatrice Arnold Hill enact legacy by preserving Mrs. Hill’s creative spirit and passing forward a lineage of artistry, resilience, and love through every stitch.

This exhibition presents twenty-two quilts lovingly crafted by Mrs. Hill. To encounter a collection of this size by an artist largely unknown beyond her community is a rare and powerful experience.

As her granddaughter and the keeper of this collection, Austin sees the quilts not only as extraordinary works of textile art but also as carriers of history revealing the artistry, imagination, and resourcefulness of a woman whose hands stitched together stories of family, survival, and beauty.

Visitors are invited to explore the quilts as both artworks and living archives discovering textures, patterns, and seams that speak across generations.

Through Florida State University's Museum of Fine Arts, The Quilts of Mrs. Gussie Beatrice Arnold Hill were digitized into a catalog.

From photo albums to a grandmother’s cherished pot, these items hold memory and evidence of generations of people determined to exist in spite of their hardship. Hill, aware of her impermanence, offered these quilts as reminders of the care, compassion and fervent love for her family, as well as an extension of heritage and place. The invocation of her quilts and legacy by her granddaughter, Anjali Austin, is evidence of this. What was once an assortment of items existing quietly, Austin’s life has now become a pathway towards understanding herself and her own artistry. There is now a shared place of respite and liberation that can be found at the intersection of Hill’s quilts and Austin’s self-inquiry.

– Sharbreon Plummer, Ph.D.

Live Oak: Movement & Memory

Photo by Meagan Helman

Live Oak is a 60-minute solo dance-theater performance that transforms the quilts’ legacies into movement, voice, and image. Intertwining oral histories, family photographs, and archival records, the work breathes with ancestral presence.

Conceived, written, and choreographed by Anjali Austin, Live Oak gives voice to generational stories of African Americans in the South, spanning the era of slavery and its aftermath. Through spoken word, dance, and embodied character work, Austin brings these narratives to life with both power and vulnerability.

Scored entirely by voice and body, the piece creates a stripped-down yet resonant soundscape. The textures and symbols of the quilts become portals inviting audiences to witness history not as static memory, but as a living, breathing inheritance.

Through its fusion of movement and memory, Live Oak transforms history into a living archive, allowing embodied stories to pulse with the vitality of the present.

2-Minute Sample of Live Oak