The Quilts of Gee'd Bend - Learning from Exhibitions

Gee's Bend, Alabama, is located on the south end of a peninsula formed by a U-shaped curve in the Alabama River, approximately 30 miles southwest of Selma. On this sliver of land, just 5 miles long and 8 miles wide, resides a long-isolated community of 700 African Americans.

Camden, the county seat, is just 10 miles south, directly across the river, but there is no bridge, and ferry service was discontinued in 1965. As ferry service across the liver has not yet been restored, "Benders," as residents are called, must travel an hour by road for supplies, schools and medical attention.

For four generations, the women of Gee's Bend have been creating quilts of extraordinary artistry. In the mid-60s, during the civil fights movement, Gee's Bend became known for its boldly designed quilts when the Freedom Quilting Bee was organized.

The Quilting Bee was established with the intent of increasing family income and nurturing community development by selling crafts and products to outsiders. At one time there were dozens of quilters, but today, quilting is a dying art and there are just a few quiltmakers working on a regular basis.

A selection of approximately 70 of these quilts, made from the 1930s to the 1990s, are featured in a remarkable exhibition now in the midst of a tour to a dozen American museums. The exhibition was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Tinwood Alliance, Atlanta.

Through special conservation efforts, this collection of quilts is now available to the American public for the first time and the exhibition has already received a tremendous number of rave reviews and has proven to be extremely popular with museum visitors. A New York Times review described the quilts as "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced" and they are "so eye-poppingly gorgeous that it's hard to know how to begin to account for them."

Motivated by the basic need to keep their families warm, the women of Gee's Bend, who lived and worked virtually in solitude, transformed scraps of material into a visionary art form.

Lacking the influence of the world outside of Gee's Bend, it is not surprising that the designs of these quilts are in striking contrast with the ordered regularity associated with many styles of European and American traditional and folk quiltmaking.

Rather, the bold color schemes, dramatic contrasts of scale, combination of patterns, and experimental attitude are in keeping with an African American tradition that embraces stylistic diversity and uniquely idiosyncratic compositions.

African American aesthetic traditions have been connected to certain African textile designs, specifically the embroidered cloths of the Kuba people in central Africa, and the Kente cloths of the Asante in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Their improvisational approach to composition can also be associated with the inventiveness and energy of 20th-century painting.

The quilts in this exhibition represent the work of a community of artists who, over the course of seven decades, used fabrics from their everyday lives and their everyday clothing--cotton, denim, corduroy, flannel, polyester and wool--and recycled these remnants into functional bedding and expressive works of modern art.

The women learned their craft from their mothers or grandmothers, with an emphasis always on individuality. Quilters made the tops by themselves and occasionally got together for the quilting. Most of the quilts in this exhibition are of the type known as piece, strip, or patchwork.

The quilts in this exhibition, created by 45 women, are drawn from the extensive collection of Tinwood Alliance, a non-profit foundation founded by art scholar William Arnet for the understanding and support of African American vernacular art.

Arnet discovered the quilts of Gee's Bend and began his collecting in 1998. He first traveled to the area in search of Annie May Young, whose picture with a quilt he had seen in a magazine. She directed him to Gee's Bend where he discovered quilts created by a variety of artisans stored for years under mattresses and in closets and cupboards.

In addition to the quilts, the exhibition features an in-depth history of the Gee's Bend community as seen through historical and contemporary photography. Included are photos by Arthur Rothstein and Marion Post Wolcott who photographed the area in the 1930s for the Resettlement Administration program.

Tinwood Books of Atlanta has published a couple of books on the quilts of Gee's Bend. The Quilts of Gee's Bend features 195 illustrations including 162 in color. An expanded edition, Gee's Bend: The Women and Their Quilts is a weighty 432 pages, featuring 520 illustrations. Both volumes are impressive in their content, design and illustrations.

ITINERARY

Through January 4, 2004 Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisc.

February 14--May 17, 2004 Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

June 27--September 12, 2004 Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

October 15, 2004--January 2, 2005 Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va.

February 13--May 8, 2005 Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Tenn.

June 1--August 21, 2005 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass.

September 11--December 4, 2005 Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn University, Ala.

December 17, 2005--March 12, 2006 High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Ga.

Mark M. Johnson is Director of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Montgomery, Ala., and is a Contributing Editor for Arts & Activities.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Publishers' Development Corporation
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group