HISTORY
Threading
History Together
Women’s clothing styles are a reflection
on more than just fashion. For insight
on how women’s professional attire
signaled status and the evolution of
their roles in the workplace, check out
the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s
“The 20th-Century Woman at Work.”
The special exhibition, on display
through January, showcases the types of
uniforms and other clothing made and
worn by working Baltimore women.
history. The Maryland Historical
Society embraces this complex story
in its special exhibition “Hometown
Girl: Contemporary Quilts of Mimi
Dietrich,” on display through March.
The show explores the story and
technique of accomplished quilter
and Baltimore native Mimi Dietrich.
She creates quilts in the signature
applique technique that’s associated
with Baltimore Album Quilts, which
are stitched together from individual
squares made by friends or family
members and combined to make a
whole. Some of the Society’s 60 quilts
made in this style—one of the nation’s
Crafting A Story
largest collections—will be on display.
Quilting has long held a place in
women’s lives that goes far beyond the
joy of the craft. From providing women
with community to facilitating activism,
quilting and needlework have a rich
Three Famous
Women with Ties
to Baltimore
Appliqué quilts created by
Baltimore native Mimi Dietrich
are now on display at the
Maryland Historical Society.
1)
HARRIET TUBMAN
The Maryland-born abolitionist and founder of the
Underground Railroad spent her formative years
enslaved in Dorchester County, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Her
very first rescue mission went through Baltimore, in December
1850, when she helped hide her niece Kessiah and two children
in a safehouse in Fell’s Point before moving them to freedom in
Philadelphia.
WHERE TO CELEBRATE HER: Last year, to commemorate
the 105th anniversary of Tubman’s death, a shady grove named
Wyman Park Dell, near Johns Hopkins University, was renamed
the Harriet Tubman Grove after the city removed the Confederate
statue previously located there.
2)
32
BILLIE HOLIDAY
The great jazz singer, born Eleanora Fagan, spent
her formative years in Baltimore’s Fell’s Point
neighborhood with her mother, Sadie. She began singing in
neighborhood theaters, whiskey bars and churches as a child.
After moving to Harlem and finding success as a singer, she later
returned to perform at Club Tijuana and the renowned Royal
Theatre along Pennsylvania Avenue.
WHERE TO CELEBRATE HER: Head to the 200 block of South
Durham Street in Upper Fell’s Point, where a hall of murals and
painted screen tributes memorializes the great jazz singer, who
lived in one of the street’s rowhomes. Elsewhere in the city, artist
Ernest Shaw’s depiction of Holiday—painted alongside Baltimore
native Ta-Nehisi Coates—covers the side of the Arch Social Club,
a historic establishment in Penn North. Nearby on Pennsylvania
Avenue is James Earl Reid’s statue of the singer.
B A LT I M O R E . O R G