About Rosemary Ollison

Rosemary Ollison (b. 1942) is a self-taught artist who lives in Milwaukee, WI. She moved from a plantation in Arkansas to the midwest when she was 15 years old and began making art in 1994 while healing from an abusive marriage. Ollison works in various media but is primarily known as a textile artist.  Much of her work deals with her identity as a Black women and celebrates the power, individuality, and mystique of all women. Besides drawing, Rosemary collects glass, leather, bracelets, beads, bones and jewelry and repurposes these materials into sculptural works. Her apartment is an art environment, transformed with layers of textiles, sculptures, curtains of beads, woven leather, quilts, and inventive drawings. She also designs clothing and writes poetry. Ollison says she creates in dialog with Jehovah: “When I am creating I am satisfied, I am free! I no longer just exist, I am alive!”

About Sharbreon Plummer

Sharbreon Plummer, PhD, is an independent researcher, curator, and writer with fifteen years of experience in the arts and culture sector. Her research focuses on textile traditions, artistic production, and folkways connected to Black life, especially within the South. She has facilitated and presented work at institutions such as Project Row Houses, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, Rhode Island School of Design, Americans for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Princeton University and several others. A few of her creative projects include her internationally distributed zine Diasporic Threads: Black Women, Fibre and Textiles (2022) and The People’s Quilting Bee (2023-24), an international public humanities course and quilting circle co-founded with Dr. Jess Bailey. She has also been featured as an artist-in-residence at Rogers Art Loft and Arquetopia. Dr. Plummer has organized shows such as Stitching Abolition (2022) and Mirrored Migration (2017), and is the author of Black Quilts: Memory, Methods and Medicine (Chronicle Books, 2026). Dr. Plummer is also an active contributor to Quiltfolk Magazine and other publications. She completed her Ph.D. in Arts Administration, Education and Policy at The Ohio State University.

“Rosemary Ollison: Know My Heart” is generously supported by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, American Quilt Study Group, Wisconsin Arts Board—National Endowment for the Arts, Judy Hearst - Coldwell Banker Realty, Nirmal Raja, and Victoria Findlay Wolfe.