Stephany Brown

Stephany Brown is a hand quilter dedicated to preserving and sharing African American quilting traditions. She first learned to quilt while in her twenties under the guidance of Loreda “Big Mama” Baker, her husband’s grandmother, who passed down techniques rooted in generations of practice. Brown returned to quilting when she herself became a grandmother. She now teaches the same generational style and technique to her own 10-year-old granddaughter, who is finishing a quilt top that was started by her great-great-aunt Adeline.

Deeply inspired by codes of the Underground Railroad and historical patterns, Brown incorporates these themes into her quilts as a tribute to the resilience and ingenuity of her ancestors. She believes that each quilt has its own voice that speaks to hand quilters who need only to slow down and listen in order to replicate that voice in the stitching. While she often begins with a traditional design, her approach favors improvisation over repetition. Brown sees quilts as not only artistic expressions, but as vessels of memory and narrative; these narratives she shares honor the struggles of her predecessors and affirm the relevance of traditional craft in contemporary life.

Stephany Brown leads monthly community classes at the Briarwood Arts Center in Jackson under the banner of Big Mama’s Quilting Circle where over 300 students from across Mississippi have gathered to learn traditional hand quilting since 2023. She also regularly presents at public spaces and cultural programs such as at the Mississippi Agriculture and Forestry Museum, the Bean Path, and the NAACP’s Black History Celebration. Brown was one of three featured artists in the “Quilting Here and Now” section of Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson.