OAKLAND, Calif. — Wildfires were burning across California as Marion Coleman began “Firestorm,” her quilt about the flames that ravaged the Oakland and Berkeley Hills in 1991. It is an inferno captured in cloth: the blackened silhouettes of trees, engulfed in a blaze of intricate, swirling stitches.

Ms. Coleman, a retired social worker, is now a professional quilter, one of about 80 women — along with the occasional man — who meet monthly as members of the multicultural African American Quilt Guild of Oakland. It is one of a dozen or so guilds across the country dedicated to furthering the tradition in black American culture, but few groups have taken on the challenge of defining a city through quilts.

About six months ago, Ms. Coleman and her guild sisters came up with an elaborate idea: designing narrative quilts that would convey in cloth the personality, history and social complexity of their home ground. “Our name is the African American Quilt Guild of Oakland,” Ms. Coleman emphasized. “There’s a sense of pride and possession about our place.” The result is “Neighborhoods Coming Together: Quilts Around Oakland,” a citywide exhibition of more than 100 quilts opening this week in a variety of locales, including the Oakland City Hall Rotunda.