#Gee's Bend

[uwmspeccoll]

Decorative Sunday

GEE’S BEND QUILTS

Since the 19th century, the women of Gee’s Bend in southern Alabama have created stunning, vibrant quilts. In 2002, folk art collector, historian, and curator William Arnett organized an exhibition entitled "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," which debuted at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and later travelled to a dozen other locations across the country, including our own Milwaukee Art Museum (September 27, 2003 - January 4, 2004). This exhibition brought fame to the quilts, and Arnett's foundation Souls Grown Deep Foundation continues to collect and organize exhibitions for Gee’s Bend Quilts.

The images shown here are from Gee’s Bend: The Women and Their Quilts, with essays by John Beardsley, William Arnett, Paul Arnett, and Jane Livingston, an introduction by Alvia Wardlaw, and a foreword by Peter Marzio. The book was published in 2002 by Tinwood Books, Atlanta, and published in conjunction with the 2002 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It includes 350 color illustrations and 30 black-and-white illustrations. The dust jacket notes observe:

The women of Gee’s Bend - a small, remote, black community in Alabama - have created hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present. . . . [The] quilts carry forward an old and proud tradition of textiles made for home and family. They represent only a part of the rich body of African American quilts. But they are in a league by themselves. Few other places can boast the extent of Gee’s Bends’s artistic achievement, the result of geographical isolation and an unusual degree of cultural continuity. In few places elsewhere have works been found by three and sometimes four generations of women of the same family, or works that bear witness to visual conversations among community quilting groups and lineages.

Our copy is a gift from our friend and benefactor Suzy Ettinger.

View more Black History Month posts.

View more Decorative Sunday posts.

[federer7]

April 1937 "Girl at Gee's Bend. Descendants of slaves of the Pettway family are still living very primitively on the plantation." Wilcox County, Alabama (Caption from Shorpy)

Photo: Arthur Rothstein

View full size

[agelessphotography]

African American Family at Gee's Bend, Alabama, Arthur Rothstein, 1937

[banji-effect]

Blocks and strips quilt by Irene Williams, 2003

[topcat77]

Mary Lee Bendolph (Gee's Bend)

Ghost Pockets, 2003

[florjus]

Mary Lee Bendolph | Work Clothes Quilt 2002

[jrmilazzo]

Nettie Pettway Young, "Sampler Quilt." ca. 1970-1975.

[lisamarie-vee]

[rosemarysealavender]

Questlove wore designs inspired by the Black women quilters of Gee’s Bend!

more about Gee’s Bend quilters

he also wore similar designs for his Oscar win for #SummerOfSoul

gonna look for photos....

[mt-nynj-queer]

Quilt of Gee’s Bend

HOUSETOP HALF-LOG CABIN, Jessie T. Pettway, circa 1975

[the-cricket-chirps]

Candis Mosely Pettway

Coat of Many Colors

1970

[pwlanier]

UNFINISHED HOUSE, 2008

Quilted fabric

74 x 64 inches

Greg Kucera

[federer7]

"Descendants of slaves of the Pettway plantation, at Gees Bend, Alabama. They are still living very primitively on the plantation, February 1937"

Photo: Arthur Rothstein

[nancydrewwouldnever]

The Quilters of Gee's Bend

To celebrate International Women's Day, but also because I think everyone should know these amazing women artists

Gee's Bend is an isolated, rural community in southwestern Alabama. It is a community originally formed by the emancipated peoples of the cotton plantation of Joseph Gee, on the former plantation lands. They worked the land as cotton sharecroppers until a Depression-era Federal program helped residents acquire the land outright.

Quilting began as a necessity in the 19th century. Women in the community quilted with whatever little scraps of leftover or worn fabric they could procure - patchwork quilting. This led to a style of quilting very different from more regularized patterns; forms were more freeform and dictated by the shape of the fabric at hand. The Gee's Bend patchwork style was passed down through generations of families living in the community; it came to develop it's own artistic "fingerprint" through the isolation of the community.

By the 1960s the economy in the rural area was very bad due to the continuing fall in cotton prices over decades. As a way to supplement community incomes, the local quilters formed the Freedom Quilting Bee, a workers' cooperative that gave them a forum for selling their quilts. The quilts quickly became sought after by collectors, due to their daring abstract patterns, which so seemed to echo and interact with ongoing "high art" stylistic progression of the 20th century. Gee's Bend quilts today are still some of the most sought after and valued.

Quilters Loretta Pettway, Lucy Mingo, and Mary Lee Bendolph photographed in 2015 for the NEA National Heritage Award

Please take a look at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation website, where you can learn more about the individual quilters, see more images of their works, and learn more about the community.

[banji-effect]

Mary Lee Bendolph, Blocks, Strips, Strings, and Half Squares, 2005

This quilt was inspired by an intaglio print Bendolph created earlier in 2005, titled Mama's Song:

The print was itself inspired by quilts she had made... an endless cycle of creation ❤️

[topcat77]

Gees Bend

6 Columns, 2 Rows, c. early 1970s

Cotton quilt