The Collection

Michael C. Thorpe is a visual artist working primarily in textiles, whose large-scale quilted portraits and abstractions have earned him recognition as one of the leading voices in contemporary fiber art. Raised in Newton, Massachusetts, Thorpe learned to quilt from his mother, Susan Richards, a lifelong quilter, and his aunt, both part of a family of skilled quilters in New England. He earned his BA in photojournalism from Emerson College, where he also played four years of college basketball.

Thorpe did not begin his own quilting practice until 2018, after years working in photography and drawing. Drawing on the abstracted depictions of Black life by Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, and inspired by his discovery of the Gee's Bend community of quilters in Alabama, Thorpe describes his practice as "painting with fabric and thread," using a long-arm quilting machine to render portraits, still lifes, and text-based works with the same freedom and improvisation as a painter's brushstroke.

Thorpe's work is held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and was featured in the traveling exhibition Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories (MFA Boston and the Skirball Cultural Center). In 2024, Thorpe held four solo museum exhibitions simultaneously at the California Heritage Museum, the Delaware Contemporary, the Fuller Craft Museum, and the Hickory Museum of Art. He lives and works in New York.