Unicia R. Buster has created a body of work that stitches together beauty, protest, and personal healing. Not one to be boxed into one method of creating, she combines techniques like raw-edge appliqué, fabric collage, thread painting, drawing, and free-motion quilting to convey her innermost thoughts and observations of the world around her. Her entry into quilting, however, wasn’t conventional. Although she studied photography, she opted to make a quilt for her senior thesis. “I’d seen a quilt in a museum once that looked like a giant Parcheesi board,” she joked. “It was made for someone’s grandkids to play on and that stuck with me.”
Her fascination with that piece, combined with an interest in Quaker quilts and the grid-like portraits of Man Ray, led her to explore quilting as a new medium. As a result, she constructed an ambitious family tree quilt—measuring 8 by 11 feet—without knowing how to quilt, sew, or use a machine. Sharing about her early days of quilting, Unicia said, “I had no clue what I was doing. No one in my family quilted. My mom said, ‘You just put some fabric together.’” Eventually, she found her way. She learned how to transfer photographic images onto fabric through her coursework and completed the quilt top, later finishing the quilting in grad school.
Her artistic path transitioned from photography to graphic design and even to a two-year pre-med program after feeling unfulfilled as a designer. She was drawn to the thought of helping others through medical research, which led to the pivot. However, as Unicia reflected, the timing was difficult. “I was a single mom, and by the time I finished the program, my son was four. I felt like I was missing out on his life,” she said. Rather than pursuing medical school, she accepted a job at a local hospital, which became a turning point. Her two professional worlds merged within the hospital’s art department, where Unicia found herself planning creative activities for patients.
Consequently, this time in her life would bring her back to quilting. But thankfully, the Sisters of the Yam African American Quilters Guild visited her church to offer demos during Black History Month. Inspired by the thought of learning more formally within a group setting, she joined the guild and later learned foundational skills in paper piecing and strip quilting. From there, her signature style emerged. “One of the members, Anita Holloway, introduced me to pictorial quilting,” Unicia said. “She made portraits through appliqué, and I was blown away.”
She began experimenting with designs she’d sketched, gluing them down to get a feel for the technique. When Anita became ill, Unicia visited her in the hospital and brought her works-in-progress as a way to show her commitment to the process. Though Anita passed away, her influence remains inseparable from Unicia’s growth as a quilter.
What began as trial and error with glue, yarn, and improvisational handwork grew into a colorful and expressive form of storytelling. For example, Unicia’s early works, like Afro Clouds and Afro Flowers, celebrated the textures of natural Black hair. “I’d take yarn, wrap it in fabric, glue it, and try to stitch it by hand. It was a mess, but I was learning,” she said with a laugh. Eventually, her work would turn toward protest. In response to the 2020 uprisings, she created a quilt in the style of an Italian Renaissance crucifixion, showing George Floyd and other victims of police violence, with mourners based on his family. Unicia shared that she also grieved while creating the work, stating, “I wanted to make a stand through art. That was my first real protest piece.”
At this time, she was also concurrently mourning the loss of her father, who passed away just before the COVID-19 shutdowns. Succumbing to blood cancer, his loss hit Unicia hard. She went on to share how she had to navigate depression and the COVID-19 shut down simultaneously, ultimately finding peace in making. That period of mourning and reflection embedded her work with even more depth. “There’s something about stitching through that kind of pain,” she said. “It helped me process what words couldn’t.”
Unicia’s current series, “Beautiful Contradictions,” continues that exploration of quilting the unspoken. Through hand-drawn and linocut imagery, she embeds symbols of beauty and death into each quilt to explore the things that society attempts to sweep beneath the surface. From afar, many of the works in this series deceptively resemble floral quilts. However, upon closer examination, you might see smoke from bombings, tombstones, and even lynched figures. When discussing the concepts, she explained, “I want viewers to confront discomfort. The prettiness invites you in, but then, you’re forced to reckon with what’s underneath.” She has even developed a spreadsheet to help her track motifs for “Beautiful Contradictions,” with the goal of creating additional pieces that encourage viewers to confront the injustices that continue to take place before our very eyes.
Sharbreon Plummer, PhD, began writing for Quiltfolk in 2021. She is an independent researcher, curator, and writer with 15 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. Find more of her work on her website and her instagram.
