Even when we first met, in 1988, artist Michael Cummings had already been living in the city for 18 years, transplanted from the land of his birth in California. Way back then, he was well on his way to becoming the foremost Black man in the country masterfully making quilts.
Of course, he also had a day job then: an important full-time position with the New York State Council on the Arts. He also owned two houses, one in Connecticut and another in Harlem. The latter was an exuberant Victorian Queen Anne-style rowhouse built of brick and terracotta in the 1880s, at 910 St. Nicholas Avenue. It has a second-floor oriel window, roofed and sheathed in imbricated shingles. Divided with Cummings’s home and studio occupying three levels of the four-story structure, it also included an income-producing floor-through apartment on another.
Eclectic and colorful, consisting of several collections of art and antiques acquired on travels around the world, Cummings’s decor was and is the antithesis of something I’ve come to greatly dislike as lacking imagination. I abjure the tyranny of white-on-white spaceship so widely considered to represent “good taste” nowadays.
Early in the last century, cultural theorist Thorstein Veblen identified the upper-class penchant of conspicuous consumption. Wearing white clothes in summer, for instance, was cultivated as a sure indicator of high status — to maintain such a wardrobe required sufficient wealth to employ expert laundresses and other servants. The goal was to effortlessly remain looking immaculate despite the challenge of the clothes’ impracticality. Accused of being habitually dirty, Blacks — who were so often responsible for making white employees look good, even without household help — enthusiastically adapted the fashion for themselves. Continued year-round, like white rooms, it’s popular with almost everyone now.
Late in the 1920s, in diametric opposition to London’s then sulphuric atmosphere, decorator Syrie Maugham, wife of the novelist, introduced the “all-white room.” This esthetic taste did for fashionable interiors what white clothes do for those elegantly wearing white. How superior it must feel to advertise the ability to continually remedy the potential disaster inevitable when inhabiting such an artificial environment. As pretty as it can sometimes appear, could anything elicit more terror and torture than being offered a glass of Merlot or a slice of chocolate cake, in such a room when wearing starched white linen?
Michael Henry Adams photos
Cummings’s current apartment is in skillfully adapted historic PS 157. 
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Where weary artist rests. 
Haitian and African art surround Cummings’s elegant heirloom dining table. 
Flanked by dynamic African figures carved from wood, two vibrant studies for commissioned quilts guard bedroom passageway. 
James Brown, the Godfather of Soul. 
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No such fretting occurs in Cummings’s commodious, color-saturated rooms.
As he aged, he let go of his isolated country place, which required constant attention and expense. The same for his Harlem house, which he exchanged for a two-bedroom rental in the historic former PS 157 building, several blocks lower on St. Nicholas Avenue. The neo-Renaissance-style building, completed in 1899, was designed by C. B. J. Snyder.
“Moving here was only supposed to be temporary,” he said of his three-year tenure. “I had to commute back and forth to help my sister take care of our mother. She died last year at 99. Now, I’m moving to Riverside Drive. There’s more room, but neither here nor there do I really enjoy the spaciousness I had with my house. Looking after my mother, my work got disrupted. It’s something I must get back.” Having observed that he thinks his two sisters’ creativity got sidetracked into marriage, Cummings noted, “My work is of paramount importance. I think I have even sacrificed having a romantic partnership for my art. That’s how important it’s been.”
It seems he has lived here always. Cummings has imparted his sun-filled, high-ceilinged abode with all the ambiance and atmosphere suggestive of environs he might have occupied for a lifetime. Such is his artistry; he will easily accomplish the same success when he moves shortly. But what then? “I’ve been unsettled as to whether or not to buy or rent. Now I’ve inherited my mother’s house in LA on the West Coast. It’s warm there and I’d have a garden again.”
Hating the thought of a friend moving so far away, I remind him about the traffic and how everything in Los Angeles is so spread out that one can drive for two hours and still be in the city. “Here, in the same time,” I say, “you’d be in Philadelphia!”
From his nervous laugh, I know he has heard me, and this is a good thing. Why? Because among everything else, this largely self-taught force of nature is a living treasure of Harlem, collected by Agnes Gund, Whoopie Goldberg, Camille Cosby, and George Wolfe; commissioned by the Clintons, and the Obamas; on display at the Schomburg Center, Studio Museum, National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, California African American Museum, both the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery and National Museum of African American History & Culture, and International Quilt Museum. And we need him. Harlem has already lost enough.