Erin LeAnn Mitchell is a Southern Black artist who creates intricately detailed and textured quilted pieces. Each piece of fabric in her ever-growing archive of textiles holds a story. “I’m in conversation with those stories every time I sew,” she tells me over Zoom, as one of her vibrant quilted pieces acts as her backdrop. Mitchell’s work utilizes textiles to explore the intersections of Black life–both interior and exterior–with history, geography, resistance narratives, and more, all while creating deeply intricate, colorful, and painterly quilted pieces.
Mitchell tells me of a fond memory she has about growing up in Alabama, of building “pallets”—layering quilts into cozy temporary bedding—and studying their tie pulls while watching Saturday morning cartoons during a rare snowstorm in 1993. Quilts hadn’t become works of art for her just yet. Instead, these quilts sewn by her grandmother represented familial warmth and utility.
Today, that interiority explodes outward in her work, creating large, eye-catching fibre arts pieces. I first came across her work through an installation titled The Interior Was Always Ours at Wa Na Wari in Seattle, on view from October 2025 to January 2026. I was immediately reminded of the work of the Black women quilters of Gee’s Bend, who for decades have woven disparate fabric scraps into quilts that have become some of the most celebrated American fibre artworks of all time.
In her exhibition, which included hung quilted pieces and painted works, Mitchell ruminates on the interiority of Black life. “I was making a house within a house,” she tells me. “A whole world holding lineage, migration, and the stories that still live there, just in a different way.” A quilt in the shape of a water spigot represented the “water hole” where stories and gossip were shared. Another quilted piece shows a grouping of feet in motion—a reflection of Black migration and movement.
The connection between utility and artistic expression found in quilting is reflective of Black experience, specifically how all Black people must stitch together “scraps” to make whole the histories taken from us due to the Atlantic Slave Trade. Mitchell explores this in her own work: “I’m always thinking about the gap—this separation from the continent, from memory, from history—and how fabric can hold that tension.”
Mitchell’s artistic journey has been anything but linear. She recalls enjoying art classes as a kid in Alabama, where she fell in love with drawing and began exploring possibilities with paint. From there, she attended a high school that specialized in art and began honing in on the types of work that would eventually grow into her distinct style today. However, her time attending college at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago was where her love of fibre arts took root. There she explored dyeing, repeat patterning, and screen printing. Textiles became part of her vocabulary, though quilting had not yet taken center stage.
As is the case for many folks who pursue the arts in the United States, Mitchell graduated and was thrust into a world not built for artistic life. She entered a period of creative dormancy and worked at a bank for five or so years. “I was in a period of survival mode,” she told me. “But I always knew that I wanted to return to my art.”
That opportunity arose when she found studio space in Chicago and made a leap of faith to pursue her art full-time. It was during that time that she began making real connections in the art world, her pieces began to sell with the help of supportive community and gallery connections, and she used that momentum to move back to Alabama and center herself within her Southern Black roots.
Throughout those years, Mitchell’s style changed from predominantly painted works with collaged fabrics that created dynamic textures to solely using fabric as her medium. “Fabric became my paint,” she tells me. “Quilting was the language I used to explore the Black South, and cloth became my global archive. From indigo to Dutch wax to shweshwe, each textile carries memory, migration, and belonging. My work became about stitching together the gaps in our history and reconnecting a scattered story.”
By stitching together these fabrics, Mitchell contributes to a growing dialogue between Black and diasporic experience, the rejoining and remaking of lost histories, and the imaginative work needed to present new narratives around Black life past, present, and future.
The quilted pieces that Mitchell creates have an evocative painterly quality, thanks to precisely cut and sewn pieces of fabric that are formed into faces, architectures, and natural ecosystems. The images she creates pop out of these quilted canvases with a depth not present in solely painted works. These pieces allowed Mitchell to begin taking part in residencies all over the globe, including South Africa, France, Türkiye, and more.
More recently, Mitchell has moved on to new projects that explore different emotions like rage and anger. In Strike Anywhere (2025), we see a smirking Black girl’s face behind a box of matches that are shaped like fists. This kind of work represents new territory for Mitchell, who is thinking about the current state of our country and how rage is an active element in promoting positive change. Near the end of our conversation, she asks me, “What do we do with this anger if it’s not to bash people? How do we transmute it into something that shifts the paradigm?” Fire clears ground, ash fertilizes, and there is a usefulness to anger that Mitchell is tapping into with this new chapter of her art life.
Now based in Harlem, living in a historically Black building once home to the likes of W.E.B. DuBois and Thurgood Marshall, Mitchell is in deep conversation with this long lineage of Black intellectuals and creatives. She finds connections everywhere around her, “Everything is a quilt,” she tells me. “Every place I’ve lived, every story I’ve carried—they’re all stitched together in the work.”
This feature was published in partnership with Wa Na Wari as part of our writer-in-residence program. Learn more about the partnership here.