GUEST: I saw this behind a glass counter at an antique store in Cleveland, Tennessee, with my mom and my sister. And something spoke to me, I guess, and I had no idea what it even looked like pulled out. My mom got it for me for Christmas that year.
APPRAISER: Oh, how nice-- was this recently?
GUEST: Ten years ago, probably?
APPRAISER: And so, when you got it home, what did you find out?
GUEST: I know that she is from Louisiana, I believe. And African American woman. She's passed away now. I think her mother was a quilter, as well. I don't know much more about her.
APPRAISER: Sarah Mary Taylor. She was a quilter influenced by her aunt, as well as her mother, who made quilts.
GUEST: Ooh.
APPRAISER: She was born in 1916 and she died in 2000. She was known for these colorful, powerful quilts. In the appliqué, she would use things from magazines and newspapers. And she would make cut fabrics of them...
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: ...and then assemble them on her windows to see how it would look if it was made into a quilt.
GUEST: Oh!
APPRAISER: What I really like about her work, it's so bold, and colorful, and big, and she has a very distinct quality of her own. This particular quilt is cotton. She originally used things like bed skirts. It's a little hard to exactly date these, but I would say probably circa 1980. She had five husbands, and she was extraordinarily colorful woman. She lived on a plantation almost her whole life. She worked in the field. She was a caregiver. She did manual labor. And this was one of the few things that she could earn a living on her own. She didn't have a gallery. She just made things out of her house.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: So we don't really know what her output was. We just know that these are very rare and uncommon to find on the secondary market. You mentioned you got this as a Christmas present from your mom. Do you remember what she paid for it?
GUEST: I think she paid around $260 for it.
APPRAISER: She's very collected. In fact, she has a quilt that she made for the movie The Color Purple, and the Smithsonian Institute has a quilt of hers.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: The African American collectibles market is really strong right now, especially over the past five to ten years. I would put a pre-sale estimate on this of $5,000 to $7,000.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: And to be honest, as strong as the market has been, it could even bring double that.
GUEST: Oh, my gosh, thank you, that is great. I mean, I think it's beautiful, but that's... That is not what I ex... I mean, I didn't know what to expect, thank you.
