Gladys-Marie Fry

He married Obelia Swearingen in 1927.

They had a son, Louis Jr., in 1928 (also an architect, who died in 2006).

She spent many years researching enslaved African culture with a special emphasis on the material artifacts of enslaved African women, while earning degrees in history and folklore at Howard University and a PhD at Indiana University.

Gladys-Marie Fry (April 6, 1931 – November 7, 2015) was Professor Emerita of Folklore and English at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, and a leading authority on African American textiles.

Fry earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from Howard University and her Ph.D. from Indiana University.

She is the author of Stitched From the Soul: Slave Quilting in the Ante-Bellum South and Night Riders in Black Folk History.

A contributor or author to 8 museum catalogs, Fry is also the author of a number of articles and book chapters.

Fry has also served as the curator for 11 museum exhibitions (including the Smithsonian in Washington, DC) and consultant to exhibits and television programs around the nation.

Gladys-Marie Fry was born on April 6, 1931 in Washington, D.C., in the Freedmen's Hospital on the Howard University campus, where her father was Chairman of the Architectural Department.

Her father, Louis Edwin Fry Sr., was an eminent architect.

In 1976, Fry published landmark research about American quilt maker Harriet Powers' life in Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art 1770-1976, an exhibit catalog.

This was the first full-scale investigation about the life and Bible-themed quilts of Powers (an African American slave, folk artist and quilt maker from rural Georgia, whose surviving works are on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts).

For her book Stitched from the Soul, she mailed 600 letters to museums in the early 1980s looking for "black folk survivals".

Her search identified almost 150 previously unknown slave-made quilts (identified on museum accession cards of the time as "made by unknown darkey").

Fry was one of the early researchers to document African American men quilting.

Fry was a Bunting Institute Fellow from 1988-1989 at Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and retired Professor Emerita from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2000.

Fry was a frequent lecturer at educational institutions in the United States and abroad.

She curated a dozen exhibitions that have been hosted at major institutions.

Among them are the Eva and Morris Feld Gallery of the Museum of American Folk Art at Lincoln Square in New York City, the Renwick Gallery and the Anacostia Museum of Art of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, Alabama, Afro-American Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, and the Art Gallery at the University of Maryland.

Fry is famous for the following two seminal folklore works:

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships to Assist Research and Artistic Creation: 1995: US & Canada Competition

Humanities - Folklore & Popular Culture.

She curated the 1998 exhibit Man Made: African-American Men and Quilting Traditions, which included quilts by enslaved Africans Paul Buford, Raymond Dobard, David Driskell and eleven others.

Fry co-founded the Association of African and African-American Folklorists and was a member in good standing of the American Folklore Society.

She died on November 7, 2015, at the age of 84 from a heart attack.