The Raleigh artist explores her family heritage through her self-taught quilting practice which stemmed from a love of fashion as a child.
by Colony Little | photography by Joshua Steadman

For many quilters, the craft is passed down through generations: children sit with their mothers, aunties and grandmothers, learning to stitch strips of fabric together through time-honored traditions. For Raleigh-based mixed-media artist Aliyah Bonnette, her unique quilting practice was self-taught — and it led her back to an ancestral muse. As a child growing up in Baltimore, Bonnette was drawn to garment and textile design, fascinated with competition shows like Project Runway. But her fantasy of becoming a fashion designer began and ended around 9 years old, when she found that threading bobbins on the sewing machine was a bit too troublesome. Years later, while living in North Carolina, new creative pursuits caught her eye and her imagination.

“I had just moved from Maryland to Garner and joined an art club with some new friends,” she says. “Painting figures was something that I started almost immediately — the form, skin tones and emotions you can achieve while painting figures drew me to figurative works.” When Bonnette enrolled at East Carolina University, she originally planned to become an art teacher. “I was focused on teaching K through 12,” she says, “but I had a professor — who I am still close with to this day — who pulled me aside and said, you need to do studio art.”

During this time, Bonnette took an African American studies course where she learned about how quilts and their intricate patterns were believed to have been used as communication devices to guide escaped slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad. That inspired her to include quilting in her own artistic practice. Her first painted quilt combined four traditional quilt blocks with five painted blocks and text in a trenchant commentary on the legacy of slavery in the United States. She graduated in 2021 with a dual concentration in textiles and painting, alongside a minor in African American studies.

When Bonnette went home to Raleigh to retrieve the sewing machine she’d shelved as a kid, her mother encouraged her to call her grandfather, whose late wife, Aliyah’s grandmother Sarah, was also a quilter. “He said, I still have all her fabric and quilts, everything is still in my basement. He was a little hoarder, Bonnette laughs. “We always joked that if that apocalypse happened, it was his house that we were going to.”

This discovery inspired an impromptu road trip to her grandfather’s home in Atlanta, where he rolled out three large, rusted barrels of quilts — many of which were unfinished — along with bolts of fabric. “He told me he’d go to the ‘end of the bolt’ sales at J.C. Penney in the 1960s and ‘70s and buy barrels of fabric for my grandma to quilt with,” says Bonnette.

This trove of material became a source of inspiration for Bonnette. She found that the communicative properties of making quilts felt just as fortuitous as the fabric itself: with every stitch and seam, Bonnette felt a growing spiritual connection to her grandmother. “It felt like a chance to know her in a way that nobody else had thought of; all these quilts were just sitting there for over 20 years,” she says. Over the next three months, Bonnette completed a few of her grand- mother’s unfinished quilts and gave them to members of her family.

Then, inspired by multimedia artists like Faith Ringgold, Derrick Adams and Basil Kincaid, who use painting, text and textiles to celebrate contemporary Black life, Bonnette experimented further by fusing her figurative painting with this new source of deeply personal material. Her first painted piece using one of her grandmother’s quilts, titled Haint Vs. Self Vs. Justice, is an embellished piece with floral appliques in various patterns, stitched together to form Black-Eyed Susans. On the quilt, she painted a portrait of a nude woman reclining on her side.

The figure is rendered in shades of Haint blue, a color that is traditionally used for the underside of porch ceilings to ward off evil spirits in Southern homes. “Haint Vs. Self. Vs Justice is a collaboration quilt with my grandmother,” Bonnette says. “This piece is about a woman coming to terms with herself and her sexuality. She is surrounded in a protective veil of her ancestors — seen in the spray paint around the figure — and facing the Black-Eyed Susans, which are a symbol for justice.”

The protective energy of her ancestors is a theme she’s carried through much of her work. Many of her early quilts include pictures of peaches alongside her subjects, whom she describes as “representations of me and the women around me.” With the peaches, she explains, “I construct stories of our own blackness, femininity and sexuality beyond the violence and hyper-sexualization that we face as Black women.” Beneath these representations lies an undercurrent of deep, spiritual connection to her ancestral roots, often represented as water: flowing cascades of fabric or blue patches are often included within her work.

“Whenever I’m near a body of water, my ancestors are the first thing that I think about,” she says. “It feels like a heaviness, but I’ve always felt more calm with water.” Lately, Bonnette has been exploring different representations of her “kindred” — a word she uses to describe her ancestral ties — depicting them as mysterious beings wearing pink ski masks. She debuted a series of works from this collection in a 2024 solo show at Artspace titled Onslaught.

The title refers to an idea she has of a legion of spiritual guardians that protects the subjects in her quilts. “I started thinking of them as an army because I kept making more of them and they just kept showing up in my pieces,” she says. “They’re either protecting somebody, showing somebody a path or fiercely attacking something.”

To workshop her ideas, Bonnette creates storyboards using large pieces of flip chart paper and a maquette. Her work often draws from Afrofuturist themes and science fiction, one of her favorite authors being Octavia Butler, and depicts mythical worlds that her subjects inhabit.

Raleigh textile artist Precious Lovell has been both a mentor and fan of Bonnette’s unique process and point of view throughout her growing career. “When I first met Aliyah, I was impressed with how she recognized and embraced the importance of textiles as carriers of histories and stories, especially by women from the African Diaspora,” says Lovell. “Aliyah gives quilts a contemporary existence through her distinctive brand of storytelling.” Michelle Wilkie is a fellow quilter and artist at Artspace who has collaborated with Bonnette on a Sip and Stitch program, which invites crafters of all ages and experience levels to create with one another.

“Aliyah has such a unique way of capturing and expressing one’s history and experiences through word, color and figures,” says Wilkie. “She’s made me want to learn more about our histories, how to connect and explore other people’s experiences outside of my own.” Through their work, many artists attempt to construct the realities they want to inhabit, and for Bonnette, her art is a form of storytelling that is both self-deterministic and fantastical. “I’m tapping into this idea of how I would want my ancestors to protect me, thinking about how I want them alongside me through things that I’m going through that are extremely personal,” she says.

Part of that journey is Bonnette grappling with the death of both of her grandfathers within the last year. “I think of them while I’m making this work. In my head, they’ve become part of my onslaught,” says Bonnette. In December, she moved out of her Artspace studio, opting to work at home as she explores new work, not necessarily in textiles, based on the Onslaught idea: “I’m printmaking, working on an artist’s book… I want to give myself the opportunity to experiment.”

This article originally appeared in the February 2025 of WALTER magazine.