said she produced "about twenty quilts a month," even while teaching full time. The first exhibition of Wells's quilts was in 1985, at the Kentuck Art Festival in Northport, Alabama, after her agent, a Tuscaloosa folk art dealer named Robert Cargo, convinced her to show her work in public. That year, her quilts were awarded Best in Show, an award she went on to receive at the festival again in 1990, 1991, 1995, 1997, and 2004. One of Wells's first exhibitions outside of Alabama was in the 1989 traveling quilt exhibit "Stitching Memories: African-American Story Quilts," shown, among other places, at Williams College of Art in Massachusetts. Since then, Wells has exhibited quilts in galleries and museums including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the International Quilt Museum, and the Flint African American Quilters Guild. Wells's quilts have also appeared on Hallmark cards, and in 1993 she was invited to design an ornament for the White House Christmas Tree. In an interview, Wells said, "My work is not traditional. I like it that way. If people tell me to turn my ends under, I'll leave them raggedy. If they tell me to make my stitches small and tight. I'll leave them loose. Sometimes you can trip over my stitches they're so big. You can always recognize the traditional quilters who come by and see my quilts. They sort of cringe.” Wells has received the 1998 Alabama Arts and Visual Craftsmen award and the 2019 Governor’s Arts Award from the Alabama State Council on the Arts., Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, The Birmingham Museum of Art, the Kentuck Arts Center, the National Museum of African American History, and the International Quilt Museum. In 2018 and 2019, Wells served as Creative Director for the Tuscaloosa 200 Bicentennial Project, where she oversaw the creation of a collaborative quilt commemorating the occasion. New York Times art critic Martha Schwendener called Wells's 1989 quilt "Yesterday: Civil Rights in the South III" an "epic quilt that shows the Mayflower arriving in North America, with a black man rowing a white man ashore." Schwendener compared Wells's quilting practice to that of Harriet Powers, a 19th century slave in Georgia who made quilts that told stories from the Bible. Noted works Being in Total Control of Herself. Quilt, 1990. Elvis. Quilt featuring portrait of