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Quilts and quilters have compelling stories to tell

Story by Joe Whitten
Photos by Susan Wall
Submitted Photos

Gee's Bend quilts, vibrant and spontaneous, have been exhibited and written about around the world, but for Claudia Pettway Charley, born in Gee's Bend and now living in Pell City, quilts have been an everyday fact of life.

She grew up nurtured by the women whose quilts would one day be showcased in museums across the globe. It was a legacy, an art learned from her mother, Tinnie Pettway; her grandmother, Malissia Pettway; her aunt, Minnie Pettway; and other quilters of the close-knit community.

Sewn by descendants of slaves from a plantation on the Alabama River, these quilts have made Gee's Bend and the quilters internationally famous.

From The Times of London - "The women of Gee's Bend ... have shattered artistic boundaries. Their bold, vibrant designs are as radically different from orthodox quilt patterns as Picasso was from anyone who preceded him."

From The New York Times - "What makes this (Gee's Bend) tradition so compelling is that unlike most quilts in the European-American tradition, which favor uniformity, harmony and precision, Gee's Bend quilts include wild, improvisatory elements: broken patterns, high color contrasts, dissonance, asymmetry and syncopation. ..."

Quilting originated in the Orient as padded garments, then made its way to Europe by way of returning 13 th century crusaders, and eventually evolved into bedding.

Quilts came to the New World with the first settlers and were necessary in the home well into the 20 th century.

In the second half of the 20 th century, there burst upon both the quilting world and the art world the phenomena of Gee's Bend quilts. In 2018 the Bend's quilts again came to prominence through the official portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama painted by Amy Sherald of Baltimore. Mrs. Obama's portrait gown features quilt blocks associated with Gee's Bend quilts. In 2018, Sherald visited Gee's Bend quilters and had a grand time in Tinnie Pettway's home hearing stories from the past told by Tinnie and her sister Minnie.

Gee's Bend quilter and entrepreneur, Claudia Pettway Charley, is partner in the family-owned business and currently owns the registered trademark for that business, That's Sew Gee's Bend. In a recent interview at the Pell City Library, among an array of her quilts as well as her mother's, she talked about her process of making a quilt. "Everything comes from the head and the heart - what the feeling is at that moment, that time when you put a piece together. No patterns, nothing like that."

The fascination and beauty of a Gee's Bend quilt is its spontaneity. Each quilt is a serendipity of seemingly haphazard colors and shapes that harmonize into a thing of beauty which sings to the observer's soul.

A New York Times reporter wrote that the earliest Bend quilts "...came into being alongside gospel, blues, ragtime and jazz," an era when strict rules of music composition were tossed aside. Think of trumpeter Louie Armstrong or pianist Thelonious Monk departing from the written notes and improvising his mood of the moment into improvisations.

Now look at a Gee's Bend quilt and realize the placement of color, fabric texture and shape speak a language of mood or emotion, unhampered by strict adherence to geometrical pattern and form. The green-bordered Double Glory quilt by Tinnie Pettway (Claudia's mother) is as lively as New Orleans jazz vibrating the night.

Claudia acknowledged her quilts to be both improvisational and abstract - each quilt "is true to itself," she said.

When asked her thoughts when beginning a new quilt, Claudia replied: "It could be your mood at that particular time; the weather; how you are feeling. If you're feeling excited and happy, you may choose a lot of bright (colors) for the piece - I'm speaking of myself now. You just kind of know the direction you want the piece to go. It's not just one thing; it could be a multitude of things that would make you choose certain fabrics and colors."

Tinnie Pettway's thoughts on starting a quilt correspond with her daughter's. "Fabric is not the problem," she said. "My problem is the design - and I have no special design (in mind) when I'm making a quilt. I think of how I want it, and sometimes that don't work out, and I just let that go. I take a portion of the quilt, and I lay it out on the floor, and I look at it. I turn it around, and whatever looks the best to me when I place it together, then that's the way I sew it." Her yellow-bordered Multi Block Crossroads quilt is a striking example of how successfully she works this technique.

The Bend quilters do have "traditional patterns," Tinnie said; "...things like Grandma's Dream, Nine Patch, String, or the one we call House Top - those are regular quilts that everybody makes. But I have no particular pattern. I just sew pieces together. If they look good, I sew the pieces together.

"And everybody who sees one (of our quilts) knows that that's a Gee's Bend quilt. It's put together just as our mind tells us - most time with no set form and no set pattern. That's how we do it."
How did they get here from there?
To understand Gee's Bend quilts, you need to answer the question, "How did Gee's Bend quilts originate?" To answer that, you must know some of the history of this particular bend in the Alabama River. And to appreciate the abstract beauty of the quilts, you must understand the pervasive tension between despair and hope in their lives.

Joseph Gee, from North Carolina, settled in the Bend around 1816 and established a plantation in the rich, fertile river-bottom land. According to Harvey H. Jackson II in his Rivers of History: Life on the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama, Joseph died in 1824 and left the plantation and 47 slaves to his nephews still living in the east. One nephew, Charles Gee, moved to Alabama and ran the plantation until the 1840s. At that time, to settle a debt, Charles and his brother deeded everything to Mark H. Pettway. In 1846, Pettway and family with more than a hundred slaves made the journey through the Carolinas and Georgia and into what by then was called Gee's Bend, Alabama.

Pettway brought change. Jackson writes, "... His slaves cleared more land, planted more cotton and built their master a 'big house,' which he named Sandy Hill. Gee's Bend became, according to one student of the region (Nancy Callahan), 'a dukedom in the vast Southern cotton empire,' and there Pettway lived in splendid isolation. Deep in the heart of a bulb-shaped peninsula, almost entirely surrounded by the river, Mark Pettway was free to do whatever he wished, and he did."

When emancipation freed the slaves, they all took the Pettway surname whether blood-related or not, and all stayed on the Pettway plantation, working as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. In 1895, Pettway sold the land to Adrian Sebastian Van De Graff, a Tuscaloosa attorney who ran the farm as an absentee landowner.

By the 1920s, Gee's Bend was an isolated African-American community. Farmers sold their cotton to a merchant in Camden. The price of cotton dropped in the late 1920s, and without telling the farmers, the merchant held the cotton hoping the price would go up in a few years. All the while, he kept account of what they bought, to be paid for when the cotton sold.

The price of cotton did not go up before he died. His heirs saw only what the farmers owed - and the farmers' held cotton had "disappeared."

In 1932, the merchant's heirs sent men to Gee's Bend to collect. And collect they did, taking everything - household goods, cows, mules, pigs, seed for next-year's planting. The pillaging left the people destitute.

Jackson quotes a Christian Century article by Rev. Renwick C. Kennedy, "In October and November, 68 families, 368 people, were 'broken up' or 'closed out' - Alabama phrases that described both a physical condition and a psychological state."

The stricken people faced the winter with the real prospect of starvation. Jackson writes that they survived through the help of both the Red Cross and a compassionate Wilcox County plantation owner who provided assistance with cornmeal and food.

From this poverty came the quilters thrift of salvaging still usable portions of worn-out overalls and clothing to make cover to pile on beds for warmth in an unheated, cardboard-thin house. These quilts are documented in Gee's Bend: The Women and their Quilts and The Quilts of Gee's Bend.

Tinnie Pettway commented about this use of worn-out clothing, saying, "...In those old quilts, to have a different color...they would rip seams (of overalls), and where the seams had been folded, (it was) still holding its color. They'd sew it together." This gave them shades of blue in the pieces.

She also told of the competition between the quilters. "They wanted to see which one could make the best quilt - even out of those ragged pieces they had. In spite of the lack of material, they used whatever they could find." Tinnie and her sister, Minnie, made the quilt, Robust, of worn overall denim scraps. Note the splash of red in the lower right - a counterpoint of hope in a field of lonesome blue.

Claudia was asked, "Do you think any of the quilts reflected the distress of what the people were going through?"

She responded thoughtfully, "It's possible. (When) you look at some of the old quilts and what they used for material - croaker sacks ... overalls. ... I think it was according to the attitude of the time, ... using what they had available. They said to themselves, 'We're gonna survive regardless of what anyone says or what anyone does.'

"You know, growing up in the country like that, it makes you a survivor. Gee's Bend was like a forgotten community - totally. So, we depended on each other. We depended on the farming, eating off the land, doing anything we could do at that time for survival. And it makes today seem simple."

In Claudia's quilt, Crimson Blues, she has created a sense of tension in the shapes and placement of red, blue and black pieces. The themes of despair and hope seem to throb through Gee's Bend quilters' blood and come to life in their quilts.
Drive for more than quilt-making
Not only was there a determination to survive physically, but there was also the struggle for basic citizen's rights, such as the right to vote.

Tinnie Pettway remembers that well. "I went over to register to vote, and they put me in a little room in the courthouse. It just had one door. Finally, it got dark, and I looked up, and there was these three men standing right in the door looking at me. I just looked at them, and they backed out. I don't know why they was looking at me, trying to frighten me or not. I don't know. But they backed out, and finally I was able to register to vote. They sent me my card saying that I qualified."

Claudia's aunt, Minnie Pettway, recalled the same intimidation and that the officials threw away her first registration forms. "Threw them in the garbage!" But she kept trying. "A lot of people wouldn't go. I guess they were somewhat afraid, but my daddy wasn't afraid of nothing, so I just went along with him." Finally, as a result of a court hearing in Selma, Minnie was a registered voter. "When we were declared registered voters, whenever there was an election, we went to the polls and voted."

Tinnie, Minnie, and others from Gee's Bend marched in Camden, the county seat for the right to vote. "Most of the people who was marching was not the educated people ... many of them were afraid to march. They were afraid of their jobs - that they would lose their jobs," Minnie remembered. "My daddy (Eddie Pettway Sr.), used to get truckloads of people and take them to Camden to register to vote, and they would put them all in jail. Then a day or two later, my daddy would go back with his truck and try to bond them out of jail. ... Daddy went to get them, but they would go back a day or two later protesting again."

Eddie Pettway Sr., who was Claudia's grandfather, marched at Edmund Pettus Bridge with others from Gee's Bend. "They ran over them with horses," Minnie recalled, "and would spray them with tear gas. My daddy would drag the ladies out of the area where the tear gas was strong."

The determination to keep on until rights were won seems to be sewn in Tinnie's Gee's Bend Geometric Trails quilt of multi-colored panels bordered by panels of red and gray - no curves in these trails, they lead straight ahead to the goal.

When asked if the young folk today realized the struggles of their grandparents, she replied, "They don't, really. My grandkids, Claudia's kids, they enjoy listening to the stories, but they just can't imagine going through that."

Not only could the younger generation not comprehend what the struggle had been, but neither could the crowds at the museums when Gee's Bend quilters appeared at exhibits.

The women traveled from museum to museum for each exhibit of their "works of art" in galleries across the USA. "We would talk," Tinnie remembered, "and tell the people how it was coming up in Gee's Bend and the struggle we had here. ... What we were telling (about our lives) was unimaginable (to them).

"When our bus would come in (to a museum), they'd be standing out like the president was coming. And they would just hug us, and some of 'em were crying, and I thought, 'My God, these are just quilts!' ... We had lived with these quilts a lifetime. They wasn't art to us as (they were) to the people we were taking them to.

"It was almost unbelievable," she remembered. "That's when I had my first flight - to a museum in California. That's the first time I got on a plane, and I'm telling you, that was something. I was kind of afraid when I got on there, but once that plane took off, I thought, 'Well, I might as well settle down, cause I'm up here now, and they're not gonna take me back.'"

She chuckled at the memory and continued. "It was joyous time. I had my first time to eat goat cheese on one of those trips. ... A lot of those quilters didn't like that goat cheese, but I liked that goat cheese, and I'd say, well give me your goat cheese!"

Claudia's wish is that upcoming generations will find hope and success because of the struggles of the past and that they will continue the quilting heritage of Gee's Bend. "We don't want it to become a dying art. We want to continue to keep the quilting in the forefront of not just artists but quilters and everyday people. We (quilters) have to find like-minded people to know where that place is, and from there it grows."

She is hopeful that soon, innovative and spontaneous quilting will take root in Pell City and St. Clair County.
Remembrance of past, hope for future
In their interviews, both Claudia and her Mom talked about Gee's Bend's isolation, poverty, struggle for survival, and the progress that had been made by the community's determination and resourcefulness.

"Things are much better now," Tinnie said. "Education is much better. We've got some very good kids that have grown up here - doctors, lawyers, nurses - that came from Gee's Bend in spite of its beginnings."

The post-slavery trials and tribulations of our African-American citizens in Wilcox County's Gee's Bend, with its injustice and inhumanity, echo in all of Alabama's counties. A little delving into St. Clair County's 19 th Century estate records expose that inhumanity. However, the subtlety of injustice lies in the fact that it may fall upon anyone, regardless of race, color or belief.

But like those brilliant colors splashing through Gee's Bend quilts, hope brightens the future. And this must be a determined hope for all.

Tinnie expressed it this way in a poem:

In this poem, Determined, from her book, Gee's Bend Experience, Tinnie expresses hope, faith and determination. And in her quilts and daughter Claudia's quilts, the careful observer can hear those three harmonies swirling in a crescendo of cloth and color to proclaim to the world Hallelujah! Amen! l

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Quilts and quilters have compelling stories to tell Story by Joe Whitten Photos by Susan Wall Submitted Photos Gee's Bend quilts, vibrant and spontaneous, have been exhibited and written about around the world, but for Claudia Pettway Charley, born in Gee's Bend and now living in Pell City, quilts have been an everyday fact of life.

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Dis/Cover/inS theQuilts of Gee's Bend,Alabama

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Dis/Cover/inS theQuilts of Gee's Bend,Alabama

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Uninhibited by the conventions of fine or folk art, the Gee's Bend quilts constitute a crucial chapter in the history of American art. The vivid and multi-layered textiles preserve numerous vocabularies and approaches to form; the interplay between symbols and asymmetry refers to histories of African textiles while also evoking the formal qualities of Modernist painting, something evidenced in the quilts of Sue Willie Seltzer (b. 1922 - d. 2010), Nancy Pettway (b. 1935) and Rebecca Myles Jones (b. 1896 - d. 1986). Forgoing more traditional art historical classifications, the quiltmakers organise their quilts into loose categories: 'Abstraction & Improvisation', 'Pattern & Geometry', 'Housetop & Bricklayer', 'Lazy Gal' and 'Work Clothes'. These process-based taxonomies often lend the works their titles, as is demonstrated in Lucy Mingo's (b.1931) 'Housetop' - 'Log Cabin' Variation (c. 1985) and Minder Coleman's ' Log Cabin' - 'Courthouse Steps' Variation (Local Name: 'Bricklayer') (c. 1940). But the presence of such organisational parameters has never prevented formal experimentation: 'Star' - Ten-Block Variation (1937) by Nettie Young (b. 1916 - d. 2010) sees six and eight-point stars in gold, blue and red held within a patchwork lattice.

As Michael Kimmelman wrote in The New York Times in 2002, on the occasion of a major exhibition of 60 quilts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, first presented at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston earlier that year: 'the results, not incidentally, turn out to be some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.' Kimmelman continued: 'These women, closely bound by family and custom [...] spent their precious spare time - while not rearing children, chopping wood, hauling water and ploughing fields - splicing scraps of old cloth to make robust objects of amazingly refined, eccentric abstract designs.' But the Gee's Bend quilts were not sewn in the name of recreation alone - and neither were they originally conceived of as artworks. Instead, they were created out of necessity and a staunch belief that nothing should go to waste. When the nights grew cold, the women would stitch together scraps of fabric to insulate their children's beds. Which is not to say that aesthetic consideration was not given. It was, and is, a common practice for the quiltmakers to publicly 'air out' their quilts every Spring, providing members of the local community with the opportunity to survey one another's methods and take inspiration for their future designs.

The residents of Gee's Bend are almost all descendants of slaves who worked on the original Pettway plantation - many bear the slaveowner's name to this day. During the Civil Rights Movement, the community gained national recognition when they established the Freedom Quilting Bee, a co-operative that translated their centuries-old domestic craft into a viable economic enterprise and saw their quilts distributed across the country. In 1999, the Los Angeles Times featured Mary Lee Bendolph (b. 1935) in the Pulitzer Prize-winning article 'Crossing Over', an account of the community's efforts to re-establish the Alabama River ferry service, which was suspended in 1967 by the white community who wanted to prevent the residents from registering to vote. In 2006, 39 years later, the ferry was reinstated. (Bendolph, daughter of Aolar Carson Mosely, b. 1912 - 1999, and mother of Essie Bendolph Pettway, b. 1956, is still quilting today.)

The first major museum exhibition dedicated to the Quilts of Gee's Bend was presented in 2002 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and featured such quiltmakers as Helen McCloud (b. 1938), Lutisha Pettway (b. 1925 - d. 2001); Polly Bennett (b. 1922 - d. 2003); and Rachel Carey George (b. 1908 - d. 2011), amongst others. In 2006, the book Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt was launched at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; that same year, the U.S. Postal Service issued ten commemorative stamps featuring images of Gee's Bend quilts. More recently, works were shown in 'History Refused to Die: Highlights from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation' at the Metropolitan Museum, New York (2018). The quilts of Gee's Bend are now in many prominent museum collections including Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Tate, London.

Representation of the Gee's Bend Quiltmakers involves working directly with the individual artists and in partnership with Souls Grown Deep, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation and promotion of the contributions of African American artists from the Southern states. A percentage of the income generated with the Souls Grown Deep Foundation is reinvested into community projects in Boykin and the surrounding area, while a percentage of profits generated as a result of the gallery's relationships with the artists will be reinvested in the community via future charitable enterprises.

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Uninhibited by the conventions of fine or folk art, the Gee's Bend quilts constitute a crucial chapter in the history of American art. The vivid and multi-layered textiles preserve numerous vocabularies and approaches to form; the interplay between symbols and asymmetry refers to histories of African textiles while also evoking the formal qualities of Modernist painting, something evidenced in the quilts of Sue Willie Seltzer (b.

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Family, Community, and Inheritance in the Quilt-Making of Gee’s Bend

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Family, Community, and Inheritance in the Quilt-Making of Gee’s Bend

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We re-spotlight an article on the Gee's Bend quilts, whose work is featured in What Lies Beneath - Women, Politics, Textiles...

With a population today of just 275 people, Gee's Bend is a small, isolated hamlet with a complex history. Surrounded on three sides by the Alabama river, it was once a cotton plantation, originally established by Joseph Gee and then later owned by Mark Pettway. As direct descendants of the slaves and subsequent sharecroppers who worked on the land throughout the 19th and 20th Century, the majority of those who live in Gee's Bend continue to share the Pettway name.

Throughout the area's turbulent history, quilt making has been a constant. Quilts were a necessity, used not just as bed covers and blankets, they would also be placed on the floor and walls to insulate homes during the cooler winter months. Due to a lack of materials and resources, quilts were created from scrap or recycled fabrics - predominantly old, worn-out work clothes, grain sacks and other found materials. These scraps would be pieced together in the most economical way, usually in large strips in order to create quilts as quickly and easily as possible.

In Gee's Bend, the process of making a quilt is simultaneously an individual and a shared activity. Traditionally, creating the patterned quilt top would be done by individual women within the home, whereas the more tedious process of completing the quilt (attaching the quilt top to the wadding and the lining) would be carried out as a communal activity, known locally as a Quilting.The Quilting remains an important social event which extends across generations and family units.

Quilt making in Gee's Bend is both a 'labour and a leisure activity'. It is something which needs to be done in order to provide for oneself and one's family but, in comparison to other domestic and non-domestic labour the women may be involved in, the processes of creating a quilt can provide mental and physical respite. The repetitive nature of sewing encourages quiet moments of introspection as well as providing a forum in which support networks and camaraderie can be established. The Quilting is a space in which women can access a moment of calm, even a state of 'flow'.This contributes towards the creation of a space of equality, in which stories, experiences and skills can be shared.

There isn't a hierarchy among those involved in the Quilting, nor do women have to demonstrate a specific level of skill in order to be involved. The need for quilts and the benefits of sharing labour take priority over quality of workmanship and results in the Quilting becoming an environment in which everyone is welcome, regardless of ability. As is made clear by the active inclusion of young children in the Quilting, even those with the most limited experience are encouraged to get involved, with everyone working together towards one shared goal.
I learned to talk around the quilts. I learned to sing around the quilts, and I learned to pray around the quilts. Everything I ever learned to do I learned around the quilts.[8] - Mary Lee Bendolf
Mary Lee Bendolph highlights the fact that it is not just practical skills which are gained through involvement with the quilting process. Being part of a wider social occasion encourages the development of communication skills among younger participants as well as providing access to other important parts of community life, such as religion. Bendolph describes how the quiltmakers would 'get together and make the quilts just like we're praying together', drawing a direct comparison between the introspection achieved through quilting and the contemplative state required for prayer. Singing, storytelling and the sharing of oral history also form part of the Quilting, allowing the younger generation to gain knowledge of their ancestors and the complex history of the area in which they live. Through these interconnected activities, children learn to associate textile production with a wider sense of communal history, fellowship and a greater sense of self.

When talking about their quilting practice, women typically began by talking about the people who taught them to quilt. This act of learning, and the passing on of skills from one person to another, provides a basis for the formation of interpersonal relationships and the creation of individual and collective memory. When talking about the quilts, the women of Gee's Bend frequently describe when, where and how they learnt to quilt, and the personal connections they had with those who taught them.This highlights the important social function that quilt making plays, not only through sharing practical skills, but also through sharing stories and family history which forms part of the learning process.
I started working with quilts when I was a child. My mother would have me sit with her and I was watching her and putting scraps together, doing like she was doing.[12] - Nettie Young
From infancy, children are exposed to quilt making activities on a regular basis, either by helping their mothers or family members select fabrics for quilt tops, or by simply being present at the Quilting. This early exposure to quilt making allows for skills to be passed on directly, through physical interaction with fabric and thread and the teaching of quilting techniques, and indirectly, by watching others and mimicking their actions.

Like Nettie Young, Nazareth Major describes how she 'did whatever I saw my mama doing' when she first learnt to quilt. This collaborative making and skill sharing process enables women to bonds with other quiltmakers, creating connections to those around them and also establishing a link to the generations of women who have quilted before them. In this sense, quilt making in Gee's Bend can be seen as a practical inheritance, something which not only connects women to their ancestors but provides a legacy for future generations with whom they will go on to share their skills.
In those days, we didn't have anything to look forward for. When we got nine or ten years old, [my mother] gave us a needle and a thimble and told us to quilt. And that's why we quilted so much because that's what she gave us. And that's what we done, we use what our mother gave us - she gave us a thimble and a needle - and that's what we're still using now.[16] - Arlonzia Pettway
In a time of economic hardship, these skills are often the only thing women would stand to inherit and therefore take on even greater value. They give women like Aronzia the ability to provide for themselves in the future but also act as a form of memorial; a way of maintaining a connection with their mothers, aunts and grandmothers, even after they've died. This practical inheritance endures across the generations and plays an essential role in the creation of personal memory, and the formation of family networks and shared identities.

Words: Jodie Edwards

A. C. Chave, 'Dis/Cover/ing the Quilts of Gee's Bend, Alabama', The Journal of Modern Craft, 1 (2008), 221-254, 225, DOI: 10.2752/174967808X325514

R. Kalina, 'Gee's Bend Modern', Art in America, 91 (2003), 104-109 and 148-149, 108 < http://www.richardkalina.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Gees_Bend_October_2003.pdf&gt; [accessed: 30.03.18]

The Quilts of Gee's Bend, dir. by V.Vadim (Tinwood Productions, 2002) < https://vimeo.com/50454661&gt; [accessed: 16.06.18]

F. Barnett-Cash, 'Kinship and Quilting: An Examination of an African-American Tradition', The Journal of Negro History, 80 (1995), 30-41 < http://www.jstor.org/stable/2717705&gt; [accessed: 29.03.18]

C. Davis, 'The Quilted Word', Memphis Flyer, 25 February 2005 < https://www.memphisflyer.com/memphis/the-quilted-word/content?oid=1116161&gt; [accessed: 13.04.18]

P. L. Brown, 'From the Bottomlands, Soulful Stitches', New York Times, 21 November 2002 < https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/21/garden/design-notebook-from-the-bottomlands-soulful-stitches.html&gt; [accessed: 13.04.18]

Gee's Bend: The Women and Their Quilts, p. 366

Republished from Issue 14: Craft, Teaching, and Knowledge, guest edited by Kate Devine

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Family, Community, and Inheritance in the Quilt-Making of Gee's Bend

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We re-spotlight an article on the Gee's Bend quilts, whose work is featured in What Lies Beneath - Women, Politics, Textiles... With a population today of just 275 people, Gee's Bend is a small, isolated hamlet with a complex history. Surrounded on three sides by the Alabama river, it was once a cotton plantation, originally...

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Gee's Bend quilts were born of scarcity and resourcefulness, arising in times when the shortage of cloth called for the inventive salvaging of fabric scraps and remnants. In Gee's Bend, this recycling practice became the founding ethos for generations of quilters.

Pettway family group. Gee's Bend, Alabama [Annie Bendolph] (1937) by Arthur Rothstein Original Source: Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)

Until the middle of the twentieth century, the majority of quilts from Gee's Bend were made from worn-out work clothes, whose stains, tears, and faded denim patches provide a tangible record of lives marked by seasons of hard labor in the fields of the rural South.

Plowing at Gee's Bend, Wilcox County, Alabama (1937) by Arthur Rothstein Original Source: Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)

"Cover up under it for love"

Beyond the needs of mere survival, there was a spiritual dimension to these quilts. They recycled what were often the only surviving possessions of deceased spouses, parents, siblings, or children, thus holding the power, or at least the memory, of departed loved ones.

Nellie Pettway (1939) by Marion Post Wolcott Original Source: Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)

The beauty and nuance within these otherwise dull work clothes contrast with the enforced outer plainness of southern rural African American life in the Jim Crow South, whose code of black subservience tolerated little open display of material excess.

"I made all of my quilts out of old shirts and dress tails and britches legs. I couldn't never get no good fabric to make quilts, so I had to get the best of the old clothes my peoples wore or old clothes I got from other peoples. I get the best of the shirt sleeves or whatever part of the pants wasn't wore out, like the back of the pant legs, 'cause the knees mostly be wore out-we pick the cotton on our knees." -Loretta Pettway (b. 1942)

In a purely aesthetic sense, the more simplified constructions of the work-clothes quilts provided a blank canvas for experiments with a range of improvisational strategies, including sudden shifts in patterning, broken borders, irregular shapes, asymmetry, syncopation, and dissonant juxtapositions of prints and colors.

During the early 1960s, Loretta Pettway created a captivating trilogy of quilts with vastly different and highly imaginative designs, all miraculously rendered from the same dreary batch of men's clothing scraps.

As a wider variety of cheap fabric became available in the second half of the twentieth century, work-clothes quilts became less prevalent.

Yet, their defining ethos of frugality, reuse, and commemoration remains central to Gee's Bend quilting, and many quilters continue to enjoy the challenge of working with a limited palette and thicker, tougher materials.

The story featured may in some cases have been created by an independent third party and may not always represent the views of the institutions, listed below, who have supplied the content.

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Gee's Bend: Work Clothes Quilts - Google Arts & Culture

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Gee's Bend quilts were born of scarcity and resourcefulness, arising in times when the shortage of cloth called for the inventive salvaging of fabric scraps and remnants. In Gee's Bend, this recycling practice became the founding ethos for generations of quilters.

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100 Years of Gee's Bend Quilts: 1920s - 1930s

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100 Years of Gee's Bend Quilts: 1920s - 1930s

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100 Years of Gee’s Bend Quilts: 1920s - 1930s - Google Arts & Culture

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The women of Gee’s Bend—a small, remote, Black community in Alabama, whose residents are mostly descended from slaves who worked the fields of the local Pettway plantation—have created hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present.

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Why Quilts Matter: 05: Gee‘s Bend: The Most Famous Quilts in America - film

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Why Quilts Matter: 05: Gee‘s Bend: The Most Famous Quilts in America - film

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About the Film

In 2002 the art world was rocked to its foundations by a group of unusual, abstract quilts made by African American women from an obscure hamlet in southern Alabama. People lined up around the block to see them, and the critic from The New York Times gushed as, for the first time, the quilt became the subject of a museum blockbuster. Join us as we trace the journey of the quilts of Gees Bend from the clotheslines of the South to the exhibition walls of the country's greatest museums. We'll explore the aesthetic and social appeal of these quilts-and quilters-as well as the controversies they engendered, and analyze their unique place in quilt history.

Gee's Bend: The Most Famous Quilts in America is one of a nine part series Why Quilts Matter: History, Art & Politics. The series takes a fresh look at quilts and spreads the word about their unique position at the center of a startlingly broad grid of topics, ranging from women's studies to the contemporary art market.

Featuring appearances by Shelly Zegart, Creola B. Pettway, Arlonzia Pettway, Georgiana Pettway, James Grubola, William R. Ferris, Nettie Young, Kay Polson Grubola, Matt Arnett, Niloo Paydar, Bernie Herman, Maxwell L. Anderson, Douglas Dawson, Karen Musgrave, Essie Bendolph Pettway and Mary Lee Bendolph.

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Why Quilts Matter: 05: Gee's Bend: The Most Famous... | Folkstreams

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In 2002 the art world was rocked to its foundations by a group of unusual, abstract quilts made by African American women from an obscure hamlet in southern Alabama. People lined up around the block to see them, and the critic from The New York Times gushed as, for the first time, the quilt became...

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Arthur Rothstein Photography - Gee's Bend

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Arthur Rothstein Photography - Gee's Bend

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Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives - - Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (Library of Congress)

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Chapter 5 | Documenting America: Table of Contents Tenant Farmers Photographer: Arthur Rothstein Gee’s Bend, Alabama, February and April 1937 Resettlement Administration, Lot 1616 1 In February 1937, Arthur Rothstein was in north-central Alabama photographing Birmingham’s steel industry and some nea…

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Spotlight on the Gee's Bend Quilt

This special program explores the remarkable history of Gee's Bend quilts, hailing from Boykin, also known as Gee's Bend, in Alabama, USA. This practice dates back to the 1800s and today, Gee's Bend quilts are renowned for their vital contribution to the story of American art.

Join NGV Curators of Fashion and Textiles Katie Somerville and Danielle Whitfield, in conversation with Paris-based curator and cultural programmer Raina Lampkins-Fielder.

Lampkin-Fielder's distinguished career in major museums, including the Whitney Museum and Brooklyn Museum, has now led her to focus on the preservation and presentation of art by African-American artists of the American South.

Thank you to everyone who supported the Gee's Bend Quilt Appeal. The NGV is delighted to warmly welcome this remarkable hand-stitched quilt by Martha Pettway into the Collection.

The NGV warmly thanks all supporters who have made gifts to help secure this significant work:

Leadership Gifts
Mrs Rosemary Merralls
Mrs Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM & Family
Mr Chris Fleischner & Mrs Dawn Fleischner
Donors to the Gee's Bend Quilt Appeal

Spotlight on the NGV Collection is a special online series designed exclusively for supporters of the NGV. This program is generously supported by the Spotlight Foundation.
This program is generously supported by the Spotlight Foundation:

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This special program explores the remarkable history of Gee's Bend quilts, hailing from Boykin, also known as Gee's Bend, in Alabama, USA. This practice dates back to the 1800s and today, Gee's Bend quilts are renowned for their vital contribution to the story of American art.

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Quilts Full of Culture From the Women of Gee’s Bend

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Quilts Full of Culture From the Women of Gee’s Bend

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Discover the rare chance to own a one-of-a-kind patchwork piece from the women of Gee's Bend-a rural, Black community of Alabama quilting legends.

Photo by Stacy K. Allen

Deep in the south is a small, rural community, surrounded by the Alabama River and steeped in history. The 700 or so residents of Gee's Bend-now named Boykin-are mostly descendants of slaves; for generations, they worked the fields belonging to the local Pettway plantation. Since the early 1920s, the women have quilted hundreds of patchwork masterpieces, passing their expertise and patterns down through the years. Known worldwide as The Gee's Bend Quilters, their renowned works have been featured in over 20 museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Philadelphia Museum of Art. And for the first time, these expressive tapestries are available for purchase online.

The Gee's Bend Quilters and their quilts embody storytelling, resilience, and beauty. At Etsy, we're big believers in connecting through creativity and in the undeniable magic of owning a piece of history. In partnership with Nest (a nonprofit focused on equity in the Makers Movement) and Souls Grown Deep (a foundation focused on elevating Black artists), we are proud to support these incredible artisans, showcasing their one-of-a-kind colorful creations.

The following story features the quiltmakers in their own words. Read on to meet a few of these talented makers and shop their beautiful wares.
"At the end of the quilting process, you can rub your hand over it-you can feel the fabric come to life."
The daughter of Lucy T. Pettway, Mary Margaret Pettway is a third generation Gee's Bend Quilter; her children are the fourth. Growing up surrounded by all the talent and drive of the women in her mother's quilting circle made a big impression on her. "[She] used to have a little clique." Mary Margaret says. "It would be about five or six of them sitting around, just quilting and talking. They would finish either that day or early morning the day after." These days, Mary Margaret loves to work by herself; "I'm what my mother used to call, 'particular about my stitches.'" That precision is something you can see and feel in her finished products. "When you're done, when you hang that quilt up or spread it out on a bed, it looks so pretty!" she says. "You just want to touch it."

Sharon Williams remembers the exact moment she started making. "I used to go and sit under the quilt with my momma (Rosalee Pettway), watching her," Sharon says. "One day, when she had her back turned, I tried to go and sew that quilt myself-and she saw I could make a stitch or two! So, she put me on the quilt." Partial to bold colors and a fan of freestyling, Sharon has perfected her quilting technique. "There are many different patterns, but I like doing my own thing, just coming up with an idea and going for it. It's very relaxing for me. I get out there, turn my radio on, and I can sew up a storm!"
"When people look at my work, they know me, the person that I am."
To spark inspiration, Caster Pettway goes on walks. "That's like the best thing ever," she says, "finding beauty in myself and all around me." The daughter of Gee's Bend quilter Indiana Bendolph, and the second youngest of 10 children, Caster quickly jumped into crafting and helping around the house. "Everything my momma did, I wanted to do," she remembers, "so I learned to quilt. At six years old, I was cooking cornbread and pulling cotton in the field-the smallest one out there!" Today, Caster enjoys making time for herself and her favorite hobby, preferring to work with a Grandmother's Dream pattern. Her favorite thing about making quilts? "Giving them away!"
"Quilting is my life right now, I love it!"
Born and raised in Boykin, Alabama, Doris Mosely learned to sew from her mother, Leola Pettway. Though she used to quilt for loved ones ("I love that it helps me provide-making for my family, my friends," she says), sitting down to stitch has become a joyful pastime, one that Doris loves. "I find beauty in fabrics, colors, different patterns," she says. "I make my patterns up, and when I have little bits of materials left, I just quilt them together and see how it comes out."
"It's the love of the quilt. Looking at the pretty material makes me want to do something exciting."
For Emma Mooney Pettway, creativity is a part of her family's heritage. Her mother, Tanzy Mooney, is a Gee's Bend Quilter, as are her grandmothers, Mary Major and Lottie Mooney-the latter whose quilt was one of ten designs featured on a US postage stamp in 2006. "They taught me how to sew at a young age," Emma remembers. "I found inspiration just sitting under the quilt, threading the needle." So it's no surprise that her penchant for patchwork comes naturally. "It just pops in my head when I piece up fabric," she says. "I love matching all the colors together."
"I'm inspired to keep quilting to keep the legacy going."
It's safe to say that sewing has dramatically shaped Kristin Pettway-her great-grandmother is Delia Bennett, the matriarch of one of the largest families of quilters in Gee's Bend. "All my life, I've been around quilts," she says. "My grandmother was Georgianna Pettway-she was a quilter. Stella Pettway's my aunt and she's also a quilter. My mom quilts a little bit, and now it's down to me." A true artist at heart, Kristin is drawn to unique forms of expression-when not quilting, she loves to play the piano! "I find beauty everywhere-I think songs are beautiful, I think flowers are gorgeous," Kristin says. "I make quilts to express myself, to show this is how I'm feeling."
"My mother, her mother, and my aunts have sewn the foundation; all I have to do now is thread my own needle."
Loretta Pettway Bennett was first introduced to quilting at age six; her mother, Qunnie Pettway, worked for the Freedom Quilting Bee. "At that age, we were only allowed to thread the needles for the quilters," she recalls. "Since quilting was such a part of [our] lives, I believe the seed of creativity was planted into my genes." After traveling and living in a multitude of places, including Germany, Loretta's family has settled in North Alabama, and frequently visits Gee's Bend. In 2001, she received a fellowship grant from the Alabama State Archive Council on the Arts. "With it, my mother was able to officially teach me the fine art of quilting," Loretta says. The quilt they made currently hangs on display in the Alabama Department of Archives and History. "It's very likely that moving around so much influenced my style, but I will let you be the judge of that!"
"I want my quilts to show my personality!"
As the seventh of 13 children, Doris Pettway Hacketts has perfected balancing independence and community. "Growing up, I worked in the cotton fields and helped around the house," she says, but then? "I left the cotton fields to go to college! I've always been determined." Post-graduation, however, she returned to her roots, and her passion for quilting was quickly piqued. "It's like therapy for me. You get such joy out of it because you use your hands to make it work." For Doris, quilting is also an apt metaphor for finding your way. "Sometimes your life is going to be colorful, and sometimes, it's going to be dark. It's never the same. So when you're piecing that quilt together, sometimes it doesn't work. But you don't throw it away. You just take it apart and put it back together."
"I make quilts for peace of mind, it gives me joy."
Lue Ida McCloud comes from a big family of quilters. "My grandmother, Delia Bennett, and her sister, Menda Coleman, were quilters. My mother was a quilter, Ella Mae Irby. My sister was a quilter, Linda Diane Bennett. And my sister is Mary Margaret Pettway. All of us are quilters!" At 17, Lue Ida moved to Brooklyn, NY, and worked at JP Morgan for 10 years before returning to Gee's Bend to help raise her sisters' children. It was then that she really began to craft. "My grandmother and my mother taught me," Lue Ida recalls. "My sister, Mary Margaret, too. I used to sit around and observe them." Her favorite quilt to make is a symbol of all those generations of give and take. "The Robbing Peter to Pay Paul pattern: It's when you take one color and add it to another color, and take another color and add it to the color before. It's just Iike life."

"There's something inherent in the women of Gee's Bend. Regardless of when we learned to quilt, we're able to adapt the style and make our own 'imperfectly perfect' creations."

A third-generation quilter, Delia Pettway Thibodeaux made her first quilt at 13. "I remember it like it was just yesterday," she says, "it was a two-toned browned bricklayer made of corduroy." Today, Delia saves every scrap of fabric possible, ("I don't like to waste anything," she explains), and uses them to pass down the family tradition-something that's incredibly important to her. "It makes me so happy when my granddaughter sits by me and puts pieces together and makes her own little creations."

"You design around what you have or what's going on in your life. Even with all the stuff happening in the world, you can still have peace."

As a child, Joeann Pettway West's house was bursting with creativity. "Both sides of the family are passionate about cooking," she says. "My mom used to make sweet potato pies, and if you ever had one of them, you would not forget it." Today, Joeann continues the tradition of both cooking and quilting-after living abroad in West Germany for three years, she returned and worked with her mother at the Freedom Quilting Bee in Gee's Bend. "When I sew, it's like I'm continuing what my mom and grandmother were doing," she says. "Now that I am getting back to it, I am finding that joy again."

"I make quilts because I love doing it, and I want to do it."

Born, raised, and currently living in Gee's Bend, Stella Mae Pettway's first source of inspiration was her mother. "Georgianna Pettway or Georgie taught me how to quilt," she says. "I would look at what my mother was doing and work on the corner of her quilts because I couldn't sew good. But I liked it, so I kept at it!" These days, Stella Mae's inspiration is all around her. "I find beauty in just about anything-looking at different fabrics, imagining how different colors will blend. I like making quilts by myself-that way I can talk to them, I can sing, I can even pray!"

"For me, inspiration is simple-an idea forms, I see it in my head, and I make it."

The 10th of 15 children, Katie Mae Pettway has always enjoyed making. "I was always doing and trying new things," she says. "I taught myself to quilt by watching my momma. I love to sew, always have, little cloth dolls and different things." Her favorite quilting material? Corduroy! In her downtime, Katie Mae is happiest when in nature. "I love to garden, raise chickens, and relax."
"When I work, I like to find beauty in different shapes, the way I quilt it, the print of the fabric."
Mary Elizabeth Pettway first learned to quilt from her aunt. "My mom, Flora Pettway, used to quilt when I was young, and she taught me a lot, but I didn't learn to sew until after she passed," she says. "When I made my first one, Aunt Ollie helped me quilt it and showed me how. She taught me how to hem it on the sewing machine. And then she taught me how to do it by hand!" Inspired by other quilters in her family, Mary Elizabeth sews to relax. "I sew to go with the flow and enjoy the process. It helps to clear my mind and let me think."

"I want the tradition to stay alive in our family."

The daughter of Sharon's Williams (owner of Sha's Shop Gee's Bend!), Cassandra Ann Pettway runs her Etsy shop with her own daughter. "I learned quilting from my Mom, and now I'm working to pass it on to Rachael, who is now starting," she says. Family is Cassandra's biggest influence when it comes to making. "Mom inspired me to make quilts, and now, my inspiration comes from my daughter," she says. "She is so artistic! We find beauty in the quilts, the craft of it. And I love the time we-me, my mom, and my daughter-spend together."
"It amazes me how you get the needle and thread to work to make those stitches, and then those stitches come together to make a complete something!"
For Cathy Michelle Mooney, sewing is a relaxing way to connect with her family history. "I make quilts to show the world that no matter where you reside, whether it's in the Deep South or the big city, your passion and talent can be shared with the world," she says. Cathy credits her mom for inspiring her to sew. "The more I watched her, the more I got it down. After I got out of high school, I took a little break. But every time I'd go home, I would see my sister, momma, and all of them quilting. Soon I said, 'Well, I think I want to get back into sewing!'"

"I enjoy letting my hands create what my mind sees-and the freedom it gives me to express myself."

For Veronica Lavette Saulsberry, sewing is a chance to learn more about loved ones. "Spending a lot of time with family got me into making quilts," she says. "I learned from my mom, grandmother, aunt, and my mother from another mother-my inspiration comes from all the people I grew up around, listening to all the stories they told behind the meaning of the designs." Each quilt Veronica crafts is a link to her ancestry. " I am proud of who I am and where I come from," she says. "The beauty of my quilts comes from all the ones I've seen and helped make over the years."
"What I do is what they call 'patchwork.' I call it 'this and that.'"
Mensie Lee Pettway was one of the original makers in the Freedom Quilting Bee. "It was about twenty or twenty-five of us," she says. "I worked at The Bee the whole time, up to now. My job was mostly to cut the patterns. I would cut three or four quilts a day." After a brief break from quilting, Mensie is back and more inspired than ever. "I make my own designs," she says. "I take this, take that, take patches, blocks, strips, laying my pattern as I go. Sometimes I make a bunch of blocks and put them together. Sometimes I start it at the bottom and go up like a stepladder. But I never seem to do it the same way twice!"

"My heart guides my work, and each quilt tells a different story."

Gee's Bend Quilter Claudia Pettway Charley's biggest inspiration is her family. "I would play underneath my grandmother's quilting frame-which covered most of the living room," she says. "Today, I continue to quilt alongside my mom." The fourth-generation maker also taps into creativity by allowing herself to be present. "It usually comes from my emotions or my surroundings. Beauty is all around if we pay attention!"
"Everything my family has made leaves me happy because of the beauty behind each piece."
For Francesca DeNae Charley, heritage and craft are intertwined-the fifth-generation maker's family has been quilting for over a century! "It all started with my great-grandmother Malissa Pettway," Francesca recalls. "My mom would bring me over to my grandmother's house, and my grandma would slowly show me how to sew without pricking myself." Now, Francesca enjoys building on her family's legacy in her own creative way. "I love having the freedom to choose my colors, and no two pieces are alike. I know I'm not repeating something from the past."
"I quilt because it makes me happy! My favorite thing is when people like them." As part of this partnership, Etsy will make a $50,000 grant to Nest, supporting continued efforts to provide the quilters with the resources and education they need to open, maintain, and grow their Etsy shops. All transaction fees will also be covered by Etsy for a period of time. To learn more about The Gee's Bend Quilters and shop their one-of-a-kind works of art, please check out The Gee's Bend Quilters page, and be on the lookout for the official Gee's Bend Quilts badge. You can also visit their Instagram page.
Photographed by Stacy K. Allen. Additional photographs by Steve Pitkin, in partnership with Nest and Souls Grown Deep.

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Quilts Full of Culture From the Women of Gee's Bend | Etsy

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Discover the rare chance to own a one-of-a-kind patchwork piece from the women of Gee's Bend-a rural, Black community of Alabama quilting legends. Deep in the south is a small, rural community, surrounded by the Alabama River and steeped in history.

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I gathered my favorite Gee’s Bend quilts, which you can buy directly from the artists! Learn about American quilting history and buy some art!

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There's only one road to get into and out of Gee's Bend. It's paved, but the dirt driveways and footworn paths that peel off of it reveal earth the color of Cheeto dust. I found Mary Ann Pettway, 62, at the Gee's Bend Quilters Collective. Just off the road, it's a one-story, two-room, peeled-paint wooden structure that once housed a daycare. Though we'd never previously met, Pettway - tall, broad, and short a few bottom teeth - enveloped me in a hug. Pettway has been the manager of the Collective since 2006, a year after she joined it.

Despite their modest headquarters, the quilts made by Mary Ann and her neighbors have been called "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced"; they rose to public prominence in the early aughts thanks to a series of museum shows. But exploitation by white art dealers who brought about the renewed interest is only the latest injustice the quiltmakers have faced. With a dwindling population, the quilting tradition that first emerged among slaves and has been passed down through generations of black women faces an uncertain future.

One room of the Collective was almost entirely filled with quilts. They were heaped on shelves, spread on tables, and hanging on the wall. Some of them were improvisational and abstract, while others followed patterns that became inverted or subverted. There were neatly color-blocked quilts and those that seemed inspired by '70s psychedelia. The quilts were made from old dresses and work clothes, simple colored cottons, patterned sheets, corduroy, or denim, basically any sort of fabric that could be used.

Tables, chairs, a sewing machine, and a quilting frame with a quilt Mary Ann was working on took up the other room. Her latest quilt featured geometric shapes in red, white, and black, plus a bit of chartreuse and the seat of a pair of old jeans, minus the pocket.

Growing up, Mary Ann said, the boys in her family learned to plow and farm, and the girls learned to quilt, clean, and can. After she graduated high school, Mary Ann moved to Mobile, but a few years later she got pregnant and returned to the Bend.

She worked at a sewing factory in Selma for 20 years, then another sewing factory that subsequently closed, then a nearby hardware store; that closed, too. She was feeling depressed and aimless. "I asked God [for] a job working at home," she said, and the managing position came soon after. "This quilting can [technically] be done in the house, but then see, when you ask God for stuff you gotta be careful how you ask Him. You gotta just [ask] precisely."

Gee's Bend - 45 miles southwest of Selma, population 275, and pronounced like the letter - was renamed Boykin in 1949, but most residents still call the hamlet by its original name, which dates to the 19th century. With the signing of the 1814 Treaty of Fort Jackson, the native Creeks were forced to cede 23 million acres of their territory (comprised of what's now southern Georgia and central Alabama) to the federal government. White settlers began to purchase plots in the Black Belt region, a name that refers to the dark, fertile topsoil of the area. In 1816, Joseph Gee bought a 15-mile stretch of land surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River. He arrived with 17 slaves to establish a cotton plantation. Three years later, Alabama became the 22nd state in the union.

In 1845, Gee's heirs sold the area now known as Gee's Bend to Mark Pettway, a white landowner who moved from North Carolina with 100 slaves he forced to walk across four states. Today, Gee's Bend is still populated by Pettways, but they're not white. They trace their ancestry to the slaves Mark Pettway brought from North Carolina or those that Gee purchased.

In 1859, a woman named Dinah Miller was kidnapped somewhere in Africa and taken to America, 51 years after the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves was passed by Congress. She has been identified as the Ben's first quilter. "My great-grandmother Dinah was sold for a dime," Arlonzia Pettway told Smithsonian Magazine in 2006. "Her dad, brother, and mother were sold to different people, and she didn't see them no more."

Mark Pettway died in 1861, two years before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Over the following five decades, his property changed hands multiple times. Former slaves, working as sharecroppers, stayed. In unheated log cabins, women pieced together fabric scraps for quilts, which were layered on the floor as makeshift beds and hung on the walls to keep drafts out.

Gee's Bend sharecroppers became indebted to white merchants in nearby Camden when the price of cotton plummeted in the late 1920s. Over the next decade many families came close to starvation. The absentee landlord, Adrian Sebastian Van de Graaff, eventually sold Gee's Bend to the government; amid the New Deal programs, a cooperative pilot project run by a federal agency was set up there. Residents paid annual dues to the cooperative and shared the federally funded, newly built resources, which included a cotton gin, a general store, and a school whose initial class of first graders ranged in age from six to 22.

The government built simple houses and rented tracts of land to residents, eventually selling small farms to locals for a third of the purchase price from a decade earlier. Though they still lived in poverty, black ownership of land was extremely rare, so Gee's Benders who might have otherwise left stayed on.

"I came through a hard life," Arlonzia, then 83, told Smithsonian. "Maybe we weren't bought and sold, but we were still slaves until 20, 30 years ago. The white man would go to everybody's field and say, 'Why you not at work?' What do you think a slave is?"

Meanwhile, racial terror and white supremacy maintained a stranglehold on the area. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) found record of four lynchings in Wilcox County during Reconstruction; all four occurred between 1893 and 1904. (The EJI's parameters for inclusion - a lynching carried out by two or more white Americans between 1877 and 1950 that was confirmable with at least two sources - suggests there may be more unaccounted-for lynchings.)

"There are still lynchings in this county," a Harvard student who spent a summer teaching college-bound black high school students wrote for the university's newspaper in 1970. "Within the past two years, a black man has been castrated, a white woman has shot a black male child, and a white doctor who is a member of the KKK has plotted to have the county's black [federally funded, anti-poverty program] director assassinated."

Mary Lee Bendolph, 83, is probably one of the most famous quilters to come out of Gee's Bend. She's got a scratchy voice and a cackling laugh; she's prone to cracking herself up. She got pregnant at 13 and at 20 married her sons' father, who abused her. In 1965, when Martin Luther King Jr. stopped in Gee's Bend on his way to Montgomery, Mary Lee and her husband went to the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church to hear him speak.

"To come here to Gee's Bend and to see you out in large numbers gives me new courage and new determination," King. Jr said to the packed church, ignoring his security staff warnings about his safety in a county run by Sheriff P.C. "Lummie" Jenkins. It was three weeks before Bloody Sunday, when 600 nonviolent, unarmed protesters marching for civil rights were severely beaten and tear gassed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. King Jr. told the residents of Gee's Bend, "I come over here to Gee's Bend to tell you: You are somebody."

Despite local efforts, not a single black person had successfully registered to vote in Wilcox County. Due to a strong KKK presence, segregationist and white-supremacist officials in office, and an array of voting taxes and literacy tests meant to make it not just intimidating, but effectively impossible. King urged residents to join him in Camden to march for voting rights. An old creaky ferry was the fastest way to get there and Benders lined up to cross the river. Others joined him on his march from Selma to Montgomery. Mary Lee recalled running through the fields to ask her husband for permission to go to Selma to hear King speak again. She told me:

When he got through talking, he said he goin' and he gonna get some water [from the whites only fountain] and I jumped up and said, 'I'm gonna get some water too.' Girl, there ain't nothin for people to have anger about, but you know they was angry! They didn't want you to drink their water. My sister didn't want to let me go. She caught on me and hold me. And I turn my head and said, 'You welcome to my coat, but I'm drinking that water.' Martin Luther came and drunk that water and I did too.

In retaliation for their organizing for voting rights, the local, white officials took away the ferry that connected Gee's Bend to Camden at a time when few Benders had cars. "We didn't close the ferry because they were black," Sheriff Jenkins reportedly said at the time. "We closed it because they forgot they were black." But the residents of Gee's Bend were undeterred. Arlonzia later explained, "[W]e kept right on marching. Only difference was we had to load up in trucks and drive all the way around."

When I arrived, the Ferry to Gee's Bend was closed. "PLEASE PARDON OUR PROGRESS!" A sign reads. "THE FERRY IS CLOSED WHILE IT IS CONVERTED TO AMERICA'S FIRST 100% ELECTRIC FERRY VESSEL!" After the local white officials took it away in the '60s, it wasn't until 2006 that a ferry was reinstated between Gee's Bend and Camden, 40 miles by car, but just seven by water. Now, it's often used by tourists visiting Gee's Bend to see the quilts and their makers.

The quilters were abuzz with news when I visited. Amy Sherald, the artist commissioned to paint a portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama for the National Portrait Gallery in 2017, would arrive in the morning. Mostly, they referred to her as "The Famous Artist."

On the day of her visit, old-time quilters showed up at the Collective in groups of two or three and sat around, chatting with one another. Sherald's extended family was there, too. "They really need some better signage on those roads," one family member said to me. "We got completely lost!"

Back in 1996, a white man named William "Bill" Arnett found his way to Gee's Bend after seeing a photograph of a local resident with a quilt she'd made in a book on Southern folk art. He offered to buy her quilts and asked her to introduce him to other quiltmakers. China Pettway, 66, remembered the day well:

She called her cousin Arlonzia and told her that a man was up there buying quilts and when [Arnett] called Arlonzia, she called my mother and my mother called me, and oh boy, I just felt like...we're not used to having nothing, you know and things like that just....a new life just opened up for me.

China told me she's always been guided by the words of advice her fifth-grade teacher gave her: "She said, 'When the opportunity itches, scratch it.' Ever since that day, she's dead and gone, I've been trying to scratch it. When something comes up, that will help me, grab it, get it, make some use out of it, you know?"

She said she sold Arnett three quilts, first offering to give them to him, but accepting what she considered to be a fair price when he insisted on paying. She said she can no longer remember how much he paid her for them, but that it was enough to put gas in the tank and buy her kids some new clothes. Arnett spent years buying up around 530 quilts from the area; he has said the average price he paid was $275 per quilt. Quilters have since said they were paid around $100 for quilts, and some quilts sold for as low as $40. (Through a representative, Arnett declined an interview request from The Outline.)

In 2002, when Arnett learned that the Museum of Fine Arts Houston had a last-minute show cancellation, he convinced them to showcase the quilts. The quilts received rave reviews and the exhibition traveled the country. "It is rare to find an exhibition that throws something totally unexpected our way, that forces us to carve out a meaningful chunk of historical space to make room for a new body of work," the critic Richard Kalina wrote in Art in America, before conceding that the Gee's Bend show "does just that."

The exhibition was a surprise hit, breaking attendance records upon reaching the Whitney Museum in late 2002. One of those visitors in attendance was Sherald. "When I saw their show at the Whitney years ago, everybody went home and wanted to be a quilter," she said. "I was like, 'ooh, I'm gonna make a blue-jean quilt'...that didn't happen."

Ebullient in her signature cat-eye glasses, Sherald stood a head taller than everyone else in the room. "Visiting Gee's Bend is something I wanted to do within this lifetime," she told me. "It's a dream come true." Her boyfriend had organized the trip as a birthday surprise for her; he told me he paid the airline attendants $20 to change the sign so that Sherald would only find out where she was going once aboard the plane. The quilters stood and sung hymnals for her. She signed photographs, doled out and received hugs, then posed for dozens of photographs. Mary Ann cut herself a slice of the otherwise untouched cake.

Later, away from the crowd, Sherald told me how the town's influence permeated her work. "When I was working with Michelle's [Obama] stylist, we were discussing different options, and when I saw that [Milly] dress I instantly thought of Gee's Bend," she said. "For me, it was a way to connect that painting to black history. Those shapes have that meaning for me. I don't connect them to European art or anything like that... those shapes come from my Southern culture, quilt making, underground railroad maps, those kinds of things."

In the years after the quilts became a national sensation, Arnett and his practices came under scrutiny. In 2007, he was sued by three Gee's Bend women who alleged that they weren't properly compensated for their art which, by that point, was being reproduced via licensing deals with Anthropologie and Kathy Ireland Worldwide and appearing on U.S. postage stamps, VISA gift cards, and pet-proof rugs. One quilter said she was tricked into signing a copyright document even though she couldn't read. Another said three quilts stolen from her were more than 100 years old. After the lawsuit was filed, the Arnetts returnedthe three quilts with an appraisal suggesting they were made between the '30s and the '60s. The suits were settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.

At the time, most quilters said they were happy with the deals they'd struck with the Arnetts, but a number of institutional figures expressed alarm. In 2013, Susan Krane, a museum curator who'd met Arnett decades before, explained her issues with his business practices to the . "Curator, gallerist, advocate, promoter, patron - those are all categories that, in the art world, we try to keep barriers between," she said. "My concerns were how he functioned as a patron with artists who were, by and large, poor... Bill was creating art history around these artists while functioning as a dealer and promoting exhibitions. If you're a museum person, it raised every red flag you're taught to pay attention to."

In recent years, Arnett's narrative of discovery ("at the end of a dead-end road to nowhere," was how he described Gee's Bend to The Washington Post in 2004) and his framing of the quilters and their quilts has been criticized in smaller news outlets and academic texts. In My Soul Has Grown Deep: Black Art From The American South, the companion book to the Met exhibition of pieces from the collection that bears his name, the textile historian Amelia Peck called some of his opinions regarding the quilts "paternalistic and suspect." Meanwhile, Arnett has somewhat incoherently compared his difficulties in the art world to that of Holocaust survivors.

Peck also questioned the larger art world's positioning of the quilts in relation to abstract artworks. She cites The New York Times rave review of the Whitney show quoted at the beginning of this article, in which art critic Michael Kimmelman wrote, "Imagine [Henri] Matisse and [Paul] Klee... arising not from rarefied Europe but from the caramel soil of the rural South in the form of women, descendants of slaves when Gee's Bend was a plantation."

That kind of review and also the way the museums themselves have presented exhibits of these quilts became, as Peck writes, "something like a party trick - that is, 'Isn't it amazing that these untutored rural women were able to make something almost as good as our favorite paintings of the late twentieth century?'" Their value, then, comes when they are de-gendered, transitioning from feminine craft to masculine art, and deracinated, or, more specifically, when the race and geographic origin of the creators serves only to suggest how unlikely it is that they'd create such pieces.

While it is isolated, Gee's Bend has long been subject to interest and attention from white people, which seems to ebb and flow every few decades. In the '60s, Father Francis X. Walter, a white preacher involved in the civil rights movement, bought some quilts and sold them at a New York fundraiser to the likes of Ray Eames and Vogue editor Diana Vreeland to raise money for the Gee's Bend community. Painter Lee Krasner visited Gee's Bend in 1967 and bought three quilts for the home she shared with her husband, Jackson Pollock.

In 1969, Calvin Trillin wrote a spread for the on the quilting collective Father Walter helped set up that same year in Wilcox County. Newly christened the Freedom Quilting Bee, the initial collective was reportedly the county's first black-owned business.

Even if they didn't see their quilts as high art, there was a sense of pride among the quilters that existed long before Arnett came along. Larine Pettway was 11 when she made her first quilt. "I was so, so proud of myself, that I had did it," she told me. "[My mother] always told us, 'The reason why I am showing you girls this because one day, you too are gonna have a family and y'all gonna have to do this to keep your family warm.'"

Larine still remembers when Arnett came through, but what upsets her is that the older generations weren't alive to experience wider recognition. "I hate they didn't live to see that what they taught us and what they were doing back then was art," she said. Many women I spoke to described the pure joy and disbelief they experienced in seeing their quilts hanging on the walls of museums.

But, even after seeing their quilts hanging in some of the country's best museums, the term artist is not an easy one to adopt. "I don't think of myself as an artist, I'm just making quilts," China said. "I don't call myself an artist; I'm just Plain Jane, Plain China."

China is old enough to remember when women used to hang their quilts out on a clothesline for the whole community to come and admire. "They had a day for all of the community to get together and just look at quilts. We used to be so glad to see them coming. I would run out and say, 'Mom, here they come!' My mama would always have a quilt for them [as they] came down the road."

Art world attention moved on, but in 2014, Wilcox County made the news as the poorest county in the nation, with Gee's Bend noted as the poorest section of the county. The median household income in Gee's Bend is $14,516, according to Census data. A local historian reported in the '80s the community was disappointed that interest in the quilts in the sixties hadn't translated into sustainable change. "Ain't nothing ever happened," was what the residents said.

It sounds remarkably similar to the words of the quilters interviewed by The Washington Post in 2007, who said they were disappointed the publicity hadn't translated into solid community improvements. "When the [tourists] come down here, they can witness the fact that we don't have decent roads," one quilter said.

In 2013, Arnett told the New Yorker that he was broke. "I haven't made 50 cents total net profit on all that I've done on black culture in the past 25 years," he said.

Without speaking to Arnett or accessing his financial records, it's impossible to determine how much he earned or spent. Still, he did sell quilts to museum collections for undisclosed sums that were certainly higher than what he'd paid for them and with his ownership of the intellectual property rights to the quilts that were licensed via major deals in the early aughts, it's hard to imagine he didn't even make a single dollar.

In 2010, after the lawsuits and ensuing negative publicity, Arnett founded the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which is "dedicated to documenting, preserving, and promoting the contributions of artists from the African-American South, and the cultural traditions in which they are rooted," according to its website.

In 2014, the Foundation began a program to transfer most of its 1,100 works to the permanent collections of major American art museums. So far, 200 works by 75 different artists (quilters, painters, sculptors) have been acquired by a number of museums across the country.

Just past Plantation Way in Montgomery, Alabama is a subdivision of nearly identical single-story brick homes. Though they're mostly surrounded by industrial supply shops, the streets are named for prettier things - "Valley Brook Lane," "Sweet Meadow Drive" - and on one such street lives the Smith family. Quinnard Smith, 37, answered the door when I rang the bell, but it was his sons I was there to see. The baby, Christian, was awake in a playpen; Alex, 11, played games on a computer nearby, and Julian, 10, emerged shyly from his room. DeShuan, 16, was taking a post-school nap; after few shouts from his dad, he too materialized in the living room.

Julian rooted around for a plastic bag containing the scraps and half-finished pieces he had been working on lately. Usually, the quilting skills are passed down from mother to daughter, but that's changing. Years ago, Mary Ann Pettway taught her daughter, Tabitha Pettway-Smith, but she had no interest in quilting, so Mary Ann moved on to the next generation. "I don't have any granddaughters, so I'm just teaching my grandsons," Mary Ann told me. "If the boys keep going, they'll be better'n me."

DeShuan, soft-spoken and a bit shy, leaned against the doorjamb while he talked to me, half in the room, half out of it. "It's been a long time," he said, when I asked him how many years he had been quilting. "I learned when I was maybe five or six years old."

Mary Ann taught him during one of the family's visits to the Bend, as they call it, but now he quilts mostly in his family's Montgomery home, where he has a sewing machine in his room. "Mainly, it's just me, sitting down, cutting up different patterns and putting them together," he said. "I'll put blue with green, or instead of green next to green, I'll put white in the middle, to make it look different."

The boys have already sold quilts and smaller patches through the Collective; they are allowed to since they are, by blood, half Pettway. When he is older, DeShuan hopes to be a professional baseball player, but still quilt on the side. It is Julian who wants to be a professional quilter. Right now he's not even considering any other vocations.

Membership in the Gee's Bend Quilters Collective has dwindled significantly over the years due to illness and death. The estimates I heard suggest 15 or so women still make quilts, but they are getting on in age too. Mary Lee stopped quilting after she had a stroke 10 years ago. "You know the babies used to be born and they eyes were closed for three days," she said. "Now they come into the world and they eyes open. They got more understanding than we had. They learn more things then we did."

But that doesn't mean they want to learn to quilt. Larine tried to teach her sons, but they were too busy chasing girls, she said. She's hoping to teach her two grandchildren when they're old enough to learn. Other quilters have tried to lure their own grandchildren with special Barbie fabrics, to mixed results. "I believe that it is a dying art," Larine said. "But if we catch the kids now and try to instill that into them now, they will get it; if we don't, it's gonna be forgotten."

In China's double-wide mobile home, she picked up the tape recorder I had set by her side and used it as if she was conducting an orchestra to describe the changes she's experienced during her lifetime. "I went to school barefoot in the winter time; I had one dress and my older sister had one dress. I would wear my dress one day and hers the next day. The children would be laughing, 'oh, you got on each other's dresses!'"

She was one of 11 children. "Sometimes four or five of us was in one bed and those quilts used to be so heavy we could hardly turn over but those quilts kept us so warm," she said. China tried to teach her daughter, who did not like getting stuck with a needle. She said:

She sat back down on her bed and said, 'Mom, this ain't for me. This gotta be for you.' She didn't even finish [her first quilt], I had to finish for her. She said, 'Mom, I'm going to college; I'm going to get an education and I'm going to work in an office.'

Like China's daughter and son, many children of that generation have left Gee's Bend, the children of those who stayed find themselves leaving too. "You know, there's nothing here in this community for them to do, and I want to see them get an education and a job," China said. " A lot of them get cars when they are 16 years old. When I was 18 years old I had never ridden in a car or truck, nothing." She worked for decades as a home health aide and now makes enough from her quilting to get by. Quilting profits funded home improvements that she's been thrilled with.

China got up to show me what she's been working on, unfurling quilt after quilt from plastic garbage bags, including one with scraps from her late mother's pink Easter dress sewn in. I asked her if she's worried about the future of the Collective. "It's gonna be around till the end of time," she said. But not because it'll last much longer, instead because the world itself is coming to an end. "Everything gonna be burning up but the word of God. The word of God gonna be still standing, but the collective, all these buildings, gonna be burning up."

Still cheery, she began folding up the quilts she had taken out to show me. Some are finished, and she'll bring those ones down to the Collective. Some are still half-done, and she'll work on them until the world ends or the quilts are finished, whichever comes first.

Alex Ronan is a freelance writer in Berlin.

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There's only one road to get into and out of Gee's Bend. It's paved, but the dirt driveways and footworn paths that peel off of it reveal earth the color of Cheeto dust. I found Mary Ann Pettway, 62, at the Gee's Bend Quilters Collective.

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Annie Mae Young is looking at a photograph of a quilt she pieced together out of strips torn from well-worn cotton shirts and polyester pants. "I was doing this quilt at the time of the civil rights movement," she says, contemplating its jazzy, free-form squares.

Martin Luther King Jr. came to Young's hometown of Gee's Bend, Alabama, around that time. "I came over here to Gee's Bend to tell you, You are somebody," he shouted over a heavy rain late one winter night in 1965. A few days later, Young and many of her friends took off their aprons, laid down their hoes and rode over to the county seat of Camden, where they gathered outside the old jailhouse.

"We were waiting for Martin Luther King, and when he drove up, we were all slappin' and singin'," Young, 78, tells me when I visit Gee's Bend, a small rural community on a peninsula at a deep bend in the Alabama River. Wearing a red turban and an apron bright with pink peaches and yellow grapes, she stands in the doorway of her brick bungalow at the end of a dirt road. Swaying to a rhythm that nearly everyone in town knows from a lifetime of churchgoing, she breaks into song: "We shall overcome, we shall overcome...."

"We were all just happy to see him coming," she says. "Then he stood out there on the ground, and he was talking about how we should wait on a bus to come and we were all going to march. We got loaded on the bus, but we didn't get a chance to do it, 'cause we got put in jail," she says.

Many who marched or registered to vote in rural Alabama in the 1960s lost their jobs. Some even lost their homes. And the residents of Gee's Bend, 60 miles southwest of Montgomery, lost the ferry that connected them to Camden and a direct route to the outside world. "We didn't close the ferry because they were black," Sheriff Lummie Jenkins reportedly said at the time. "We closed it because they forgot they were black."

Six of Young's quilts, together with 64 by other Gee's Bend residents, have been traveling around the United States in an exhibition that has transformed the way many people think about art. Gee's Bend's "eye-poppingly gorgeous" quilts, wrote New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, "turn out to be some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced. Imagine Matisse and Klee (if you think I'm wildly exaggerating, see the show), arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South." Curator Jane Livingston, who helped organize the exhibition with collector William Arnett and art historians John Beardsley and Alvia Wardlaw, said that the quilts "rank with the finest abstract art of any tradition." After stops in such cities as New York, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Boston and Atlanta, "The Quilts of Gee's Bend" will end its tour at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's de Young Museum December 31.

The bold drama of the quilt Young was working on in 1965 is also found in a quilt she made out of work clothes 11 years later. The central design of red and orange corduroy in that quilt suggests prison bars, and the faded denim that surrounds it could be a comment on the American dream. But Young had more practical considerations. "When I put the quilt together," she says, "it wasn't big enough, and I had to get some more material and make it bigger, so I had these old jeans to make it bigger."

Collector William Arnett was working on a history of African-American vernacular art in 1998 when he came across a photograph of Young's work-clothes quilt draped over a woodpile. He was so knocked out by its originality, he set out to find it. A couple of phone calls and some creative research later, he and his son Matt tracked Young down to Gee's Bend, then showed up unannounced at her door late one evening. Young had burned some quilts the week before (smoke from burning cotton drives off mosquitoes), and at first she thought the quilt in the photograph had been among them. But the next day, after scouring closets and searching under beds, she found it and offered it to Arnett for free. Arnett, however, insisted on writing her a check for a few thousand dollars for that quilt and several others. (Young took the check straight to the bank.) Soon the word spread through Gee's Bend that there was a crazy white man in town paying good money for raggedy old quilts.

When Arnett showed photos of the quilts made by Young and other Gee's Benders to Peter Marzio, of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), he was so impressed that he agreed to put on an exhibition. "The Quilts of Gee's Bend" opened there in September 2002.

The exhibition revived what had been a dying art in Gee's Bend. Some of the quilters, who had given in to age and arthritis, are now back quilting again. And many of their children and grandchildren, some of whom had moved away from Gee's Bend, have taken up quilting themselves. With the help of Arnett and the Tinwood Alliance (a nonprofit organization that he and his four sons formed in 2002), fifty local women founded the Gee's Bend Quilters Collective in 2003 to market their quilts, some of which now sell for more than $20,000. (Part goes directly to the maker, the rest goes to the collective for expenses and distribution to the other members.)

Now a second exhibition, "Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt," has been organized by the MFAH and the Tinwood Alliance. The show, which opened in June, features newly discovered quilts from the 1930s to the 1980s, along with more recent works by established quilters and the younger generation they inspired. The exhibition will travel to seven other venues, including the Indianapolis Museum of Art (October 8-December 31) and the Orlando Museum of Art (January 27-May 13, 2007).

Arlonzia Pettway lives in a neat, recently renovated house off a road plagued with potholes. The road passes by cows and goats grazing outside robin's-egg blue and brown bungalows. "I remember some things, honey," Pettway, 83, told me. (Since my interview with her, Pettway suffered a stroke, from which she is still recovering.) "I came through a hard life. Maybe we weren't bought and sold, but we were still slaves until 20, 30 years ago. The white man would go to everybody's field and say, 'Why you not at work?'" She paused. "What do you think a slave is?"

As a girl, Pettway would watch her grandmother, Sally, and her mother, Missouri, piecing quilts. And she would listen to their stories, many of them about Dinah Miller, who had been brought to the United States in a slave ship in 1859. "My great-grandmother Dinah was sold for a dime," Pettway said. "Her dad, brother and mother were sold to different people, and she didn't see them no more. My great-grandfather was a Cherokee Indian. Dinah was made to sleep with this big Indian like you stud your cow.... You couldn't have no skinny children working on your slave master's farm." In addition to Pettway, some 20 other Gee's Bend quiltmakers are Dinah's descendants.

The quilting tradition in Gee's Bend may go back as far as the early 1800s, when the community was the site of a cotton plantation owned by a Joseph Gee. Influenced, perhaps, by the patterned textiles of Africa, the women slaves began piecing strips of cloth together to make bedcovers. Throughout the post-bellum years of tenant farming and well into the 20th century, Gee's Bend women made quilts to keep themselves and their children warm in unheated shacks that lacked running water, telephones and electricity. Along the way they developed a distinctive style, noted for its lively improvisations and geometric simplicity.

Gee's Bend men and women grew and picked cotton, peanuts, okra, corn, peas and potatoes. When there was no money to buy seed or fertilizer, they borrowed one or both from Camden businessman E. O. Rentz, at interest rates only those without any choice would pay. Then came the Depression. In 1931 the price of cotton plummeted, from about 40 cents a pound in the early 1920s, to about a nickel. When Rentz died in 1932, his widow foreclosed on some 60 Gee's Bend families. It was late fall, and winter was coming.

"They took everything and left people to die," Pettway said. Her mother was making a quilt out of old clothes when she heard the cries outside. She sewed four wide shirttails into a sack, which the men in the family filled with corn and sweet potatoes and hid in a ditch. When the agent for Rentz's widow came around to seize the family's hens, Pettway's mother threatened him with a hoe. "I'm a good Christian, but I'll chop his damn brains out," she said. The man got in his wagon and left. "He didn't get to my mama that day," Pettway told me.

Pettway remembered that her friends and neighbors foraged for berries, hunted possum and squirrels, and mostly went hungry that winter until a boat with flour and meal sent by the Red Cross arrived in early 1933. The following year, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration provided small loans for seed, fertilizer, tools and livestock. Then, in 1937, the government's Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) bought up 10,000 Gee's Bend acres and sold them as tiny farms to local families.

In 1941, when Pettway was in her late teens, her father died. "Mama said, 'I'm going to take his work clothes, shape them into a quilt to remember him, and cover up under it for love.'" There were hardly enough pants legs and shirttails to make up a quilt, but she managed. (That quilt-jostling rectangles of faded gray, white, blue and red-is included in the first exhibition.) A year later, Arlonzia married Bizzell Pettway and moved into one of the new houses built by the government. They had 12 children, but no electricity until 1964 and no running water until 1974. A widow for more than 30 years, Arlonzia still lives in that same house. Her mother, Missouri, who lived until 1981, made a quilt she called "Path Through the Woods" after the 1960s freedom marches. A quilt that Pettway pieced together during that period, "Chinese Coins", is a medley of pinks and purples-a friend had given her purple scraps from a clothing factory in a nearby town.

"At the time I was making that quilt, I was feeling something was going to happen better, and it did," Pettway says. "Last time I counted I had 32 grandchildren and I think between 13 and 14 great-grands. I'm blessed now more than many. I have my home and land. I have a deepfreeze five feet long with chicken wings, neck bones and pork chops."

The first exhibition featured seven quilts by Loretta Pettway, Arlonzia Pettway's first cousin. (One in three of Gee's Bend's 700 residents is named Pettway, after slave owner Mark H. Pettway.) Loretta, 64, says she made her early quilts out of work clothes. "I was about 16 when I learned to quilt from my grandmama," she says. "I just loved it. That's all I wanted to do, quilt. But I had to work farming cotton, corn, peas and potatoes, making syrup, putting up soup in jars. I was working other people's fields too. Saturdays I would hire out; sometimes I would hire out Sundays, too, to give my kids some food. When I finished my chores, I'd sit down and do like I'm doing now, get the clothes together and tear them and piece. And then in summer I would quilt outside under the big oak." She fingers the fabric pieces in her lap. "I thank God that people want me to make quilts," she says. "I feel proud. The Lord lead me and guide me and give me strength to make this quilt with love and peace and happiness so somebody would enjoy it. That makes me feel happy. I'm doing something with my life."

In 1962 the U.S. Congress ordered the construction of a dam and lock on the Alabama River at Miller's Ferry, just south of Gee's Bend. The 17,200-acre reservoir created by the dam in the late 1960s flooded much of Gee's Bend's best farming land, forcing many residents to give up farming. "And thank God for that," says Loretta. "Farming wasn't nothing but hard work. And at the end of the year you couldn't get nothing, and the little you got went for cottonseed."

Around that time, a number of Gee's Bend women began making quilts for the Freedom Quilting Bee, founded in 1966 by civil rights worker and Episcopalian priest Francis X. Walter to provide a source of income for the local community. For a while, the bee (which operated for about three decades) sold quilts to such stores as Bloomingdale's, Sears, Saks and Bonwit Teller. But the stores wanted assembly-line quilts, with orderly, familiar patterns and precise stitching-not the individual, often improvised and unexpected patterns and color combinations that characterized the Gee's Bend quilts.

"My quilts looked beautiful to me, because I made what I could make from my head," Loretta told me. "When I start I don't want to stop until I finish, because if I stop, the ideas are going to go one way and my mind another way, so I just try to do it while I have ideas in my mind."

Loretta had been too ill to attend the opening of the first exhibition in Houston. But she wore a bright red jacket and a wrist corsage of roses to the opening of the second show last spring. Going there on the bus, "I didn't close my eyes the whole way," she says. "I was so happy, I had to sightsee." In the new show, her 2003 take on the popular "Housetop" pattern-a variant of the traditional "Log Cabin" design-is an explosion of red polka dots, zany stripes and crooked frames within frames (a dramatic change from the faded colors and somber patterns of her early work-clothes quilts). Two other quilts made by Loretta are among those represented on a series of Gee's Bend stamps issued this past August by the U.S. Postal Service. "I just had scraps of what I could find," she says about her early work. "Now I see my quilts hanging in a museum. Thank God I see my quilts on the wall. I found my way."

Mary Lee Bendolph, 71, speaks in a husky voice and has a hearty, throaty laugh. At the opening of the new exhibition in Houston, she sported large rhinestone earrings and a chic black dress. For some years, kidney disease had slowed her quiltmaking, but the first exhibition, she says, "spunked me to go a little further, to try and make my quilts a little more updated." Her latest quilts fracture her backyard views and other local scenes the way Cubism fragmented the cafés and countryside of France. Her quilts share a gallery with those of her daughter-in-law, Louisiana Pettway Bendolph.

Louisiana now lives in Mobile, Alabama, but she remembers hot, endless days picking cotton as a child in the fields around Gee's Bend. From age 6 to 16, she says, the only time she could go to school was when it rained, and the only play was softball and quiltmaking. Her mother, Rita Mae Pettway, invited her to the opening in Houston of the first quilt show. On the bus ride home, she says, she "had a kind of vision of quilts." She made drawings of what would become the quilts in the new exhibition, in which shapes seem to float and recede as if in three dimensions.

"Quilting helped redirect my life and put it back together," Louisiana says. "I worked at a fast-food place and a sewing factory, and when the sewing factory closed, I stayed home, being a housewife. You just want your kids to see you in a different light, as someone they can admire. Well, my children came into this museum, and I saw their faces."

To Louisiana, 46, quiltmaking is history and family. "We think of inheriting as land or something, not things that people teach you," she says. "We came from cotton fields, we came through hard times, and we look back and see what all these people before us have done. They brought us here, and to say thank you is not enough." Now her 11-year-old granddaughter has taken up quiltmaking; she, however, does her drawings on a computer.

In Gee's Bend not long ago, her great-grandmother Mary Lee Bendolph picked some pecans to make into candy to have on hand for the children when the only store in town is closed, which it often is. Then she soaked her feet. Sitting on her screened-in porch, she smiled. "I'm famous," she said. "And look how old I am." She laughed. "I enjoy it."

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Annie Mae Young is looking at a photograph of a quilt she pieced together out of strips torn from well-worn cotton shirts and polyester pants. "I was doing this quilt at the time of the civil rights movement," she says, contemplating its jazzy, free-form squares. Martin Luther King Jr.

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Gee’s Bend Quilts: Objects of Cultural Identity in the American South

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Gee’s Bend Quilts: Objects of Cultural Identity in the American South

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Quilting, or the stitching together of various layers of textiles and padding, is a creative process that dates back thousands of years. While the practical purpose of quilting is to provide warmth and protection, quilts throughout history have typically included decorative elements regardless of their necessity. Among the most recognizable and beloved blankets in the world are those made by the Gee's Bend quilters, a collective of Black women in the American South who have been quilting for several generations. Explore the rich history, community traditions, and distinctive craftsmanship that is thoughtfully and expertly stitched into each one of the Gee's Bend quilts.

The History of Gee's Bend Quilts

In the American South, the history of quilting is intertwined with the history of generations of African-American women in the small town of Gee's Bend. Southwest of Selma in the Black Belt of Alabama, and surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River, Gee's Bend is a rural community with fewer than one thousand residents.

In part, the uniqueness of the Gee's Bend quilters is due to the unusual geographic isolation of their community. During the Great Migration in the early- to mid-1900s, residents of Gee's Bend remained in rural Alabama instead of moving north to participate in industrialization and the mainstream art world.

In the 1960s, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. visited Gee's Bend and inspired residents to take the ferry to the county seat and register to vote. In response to the influx of Black voter registrations, white supremacist authorities eliminated the Gee's Bend ferry service, which isolated the town from many essential goods and services. Ferry service wasn't restored to Gee's Bend until forty years later in 2006.

With geographic and social isolation came artistic isolation. The tradition of quilting in Gee's Bend began before the emancipation of enslaved people in the 19th century and was passed down from mothers to daughters by generations of Gee's Bend women, most of whom remained in the community and made quilts throughout their entire lives. This is why the distinctive style of Gee's Bend quilts has persisted for decades.

The Gee's Bend Quilts at a Glance

The expertly crafted Gee's Bend quilts are known for their bold and improvisational use of color, geometry, and mixed materials. Every Gee's Bend quilt is unique yet belongs to the same aesthetic family. Quilters typically utilize a variety of recycled textiles to make their quilts, including used clothing, upholstery, feed sacks, and leftover fabric scraps from other projects. They don't typically follow a strict quilting pattern but do gather inspiration from fellow quilters in the community. "We didn't have no museum in Gee's Bend, but we would go from house to house looking at quilts and getting ideas about how I would like to lay mine out," said quilter Mary Lee Bendolph. "People go from museum to museum checking out other people's work. Sometimes they like it, sometimes they don't. They go home and try to make it, too. I think that was the same thing we was doing."

Piecing together found materials and creative inspiration from the community was an approach to quilting born out of necessity when access to new materials was limited and the town of Gee's Bend was geographically isolated. But over the decades, this process has blossomed into a way for the quilters of Gee's Bend to honor their ancestors and their community by literally and figuratively stitching them into their quilts. It has also blossomed into what is now rightfully considered to be a significant movement in the history of American art.

The Generations of Gee's Bend Women Who Passed Down Quilting

Gee's Bend quilter Menzies Lee Pettway said, "A lot of people make quilts just for to keep you warm. But a quilt is more. It represents safekeeping, it represents beauty, and you could say it represents family history." Indeed, the tradition of quilting in Gee's Bend is rooted in family history. Quilting has been passed down from mothers to daughters in Gee's Bend since before the emancipation of enslaved African-Americans in the American South in 1862, and many Gee's Bend quilters living today trace their ancestry-and their quilting tradition-back to people who were enslaved on the Pettway Plantation. After emancipation, many stayed on the plantation and continued passing down the Pettway name.

What is extraordinary about the Gee's Bend quilters is that three or four generations of women from the same family will have made quilts over the decades-a phenomenon rarely seen in art movements. Mary Lee Bendolph, one of the most beloved living Gee's Bend quilters, was taught by her mother, Aolar Carson Mosely, and later taught her own daughter, Essie Bendolph Pettway, the same traditions and techniques that were passed down from their enslaved predecessors. "We got a big family spread out down here making quilts," said Bendolph, who today continues to make quilts, exhibit her work, and keep records of the ongoing history of her community.

Textile Creativity in the Gee's Bend Quilts

"I never did like the book patterns some people had...I work it out, study the way to make it, get it to be right, kind of like working a puzzle," explained quilter Annie Mae Young. The quilters of Gee's Bend gain technical expertise from a lifetime of practicing their craft and carefully observing the processes and finished products of their fellow quilters. Instead of following a written pattern, the quilters rely on intuition while improvising their own complex versions of simple templates. "We was taught there's so many different ways to build a quilt," said Menzies Lee Pettway. "It's like building a house. You can start with a bedroom over there, or a den over here, and just add on until you get what you want. Ought not two quilts ever be the same."

The simple starting concept of squares within squares has lent itself to unlimited creativity and complexity for generations of Gee's Bend quiltmakers. A key iteration that came from this approach is the "Housetop" quilt, which features blocks composed of concentric squares. The "Housetop" quilt template is relatively simple but provides endless possibilities. It begins with a single central panel that is surrounded by rectangular pieces of fabric-connecting short ends to long ends-to form a continuous frame around the center until the block is declared complete by the artist. After enough blocks are made, they are joined together however the individual artist sees fit to form the finished product.

Quilts as Fine Art Collectibles

Until somewhat recently, many surveys of American art history-as well as the mainstream art market -neglected the important artistic contributions of craftspeople and artists of color. In the decades before historians and collectors acknowledged the cultural legacy of Black women and craftspeople within the American art history canon, the Gee's Bend quilters nonetheless gained recognition, and eventually compensation, for their work.

In 1966, the Freedom Quilting Bee was established by a collective of Black quilters in the Alabama Black Belt-including several from Gee's Bend-to bring economic advancement to their communities and to advocate for civil rights. Through the Freedom Quilting Bee, the Gee's Bend quilts captured national attention and even helped inspire a widespread interest in using quilts in interior decorating.

In 2002, an exhibition titled "The Quilts of Gee's Bend" debuted at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. This exhibition, which was the first to curate the Gee's Bend quilts in a museum setting, later traveled to several major art institutions across the United States. In 2003, the Gee's Bend Collective was formed, which includes over 50 quilters. Together, this group has marketed, exhibited, and sold quilts around the world. They also helped raise the attention and funds necessary to restore ferry service to Gee's Bend. In 2015, three Gee's Bend quilters-Mary Lee Bendolph, Lucy Mingo, and Loretta Pettway-were jointly awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the United States National Endowment for the Arts, which is the highest government honor for folk artists. Now, the Gee's Bend quilters remain key contributors to the vast and varied landscape of Black contemporary art in America.

Gee's Bend Quilts Today: The Quilt as a Cultural Document

The cultural impact of the Gee's Bend quilts is so immense that it would be difficult to find a contemporary quilter who is not in some way inspired by them. Today, the Gee's Bend quilts have been admired all over the world, and over twenty major art museums have added at least one Gee's Bend quilt to its collection. In February 2021, the Gee's Bend quilters began selling their creations on Etsy in celebration of Black History Month. Currently, a Gee's Bend quilt can sell for as much as $20,000, but a variety of products at a wide range of prices-recently including a selection of pandemic-friendly quilted face masks -are available to purchase online directly from the quilters themselves.

From 19th-century bed linens to 21st-century museum collectibles, the quilts of Gee's Bend represent the lived experience of several generations of Black women in the American South. Gee's Bend quilter Mary Lee Bendolph said, "Life is like making a quilt....Quilting ain't easy. It takes work. It takes time. It takes faith. It takes a mind to do it. It takes patience....Sometimes it won't work, but you have to keep on and go on anyhow because you need to do that to help you go through life."

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Gee's Bend Quilts: Objects of Cultural Identity in the American South

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Quilting, or the stitching together of various layers of textiles and padding, is a creative process that dates back thousands of years. While the practical purpose of quilting is to provide warmth and protection, quilts throughout history have typically included decorative elements regardless of their necessity.

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The result is a vibrant display of style, technique, and craftsmanship through countless colorful, one-of-a-kind quilted masterpieces lining the streets and roads.

This community-hosted event will be an opportunity for admirers of the quilts and Quilters to visit, shop, celebrate, and support this important heritage craft community.

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The result is a vibrant display of style, technique, and craftsmanship through countless colorful, one-of-a-kind quilted masterpieces lining the streets and roads. This community-hosted event will be an opportunity for admirers of the quilts and Quilters to visit, shop, celebrate, and support this important heritage craft community.

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How the Quilts of Gee's Bend Became Seminal Works of Modern Art

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How the Quilts of Gee's Bend Became Seminal Works of Modern Art

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How Graphic Quilts Put This Small Alabama Town on the Map

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The quilts of Gee’s Bend trace American history from slavery, through the Civil Rights movement, to modern day.

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Moore From L.A.: Greg Lauren and Gee’s Bend Quilters Take Aim at Cultural Appropriation

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Moore From L.A.: Greg Lauren and Gee’s Bend Quilters Take Aim at Cultural Appropriation

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Ralph Lauren may have built an apparel empire out of romantic interpretations of Americana, but his nephew Greg Lauren is giving credit to authentic American creators with a new collaboration with the quilters of Gee's Bend.

Debuting at Bergdorf Goodman today, the textiles for the pieces were created by 14 quilters from the rural Alabama community of Black artists who trace their history - and craft - back to the enslaved people of Pettway Plantation. The Mosaic: Gee's Bend & Greg Lauren collection uses scraps of fabric from the designer's archive as a way of acknowledging what his brand's signature sustainable "GL Scraps" scrap work technique owes to artisans who came before him, including those in Gee's Bend.

"In the past year, through conversations and a willingness to learn, I realized I had an opportunity to use my platform and brand to change what has often been the exploitative nature of fashion," said Lauren.

"I like the recognition we're getting...Greg is giving us the credit," said Mary Margaret Pettway. The Gee's Bend point person on the project, Pettway started quilting at age 11, and her mother's work was in the landmark 2002 exhibition "The Quilts of Gee's Bend" at the Whitney Museum in New York.

Lauren got his start as a fine artist challenging romantic archetypes through the materials he used. An art show in Los Angeles in 2010 featured suits made of crumpled paper. He launched his ready-to-wear collection in 2011, focusing on handmade and artisanal West Coast slouch wear for the creative class, which was in some ways a reaction to his family's brand of East Coast perfection.

"I have always been intrigued by deconstructing the concept of Americana...and helping to shed light on a more truthful version of it in the context of art, fashion and style...," he said.

That more truthful version now includes quilting, a mainstay of Americana that has become a fashionable technique in recent seasons with labels large (Chloé) and small (Bode), thanks to its association with upcycling and sustainability.

"Before quilting became popular, it was a lost art pretty much because we're losing so many traditional things we used to do just to make do," explained Pettway.

Like many, Lauren was first exposed to quilts as an aesthetic, when he began researching them for a 2018 collection. "I Googled quilts, saw geometric red and white images, screen-shot them and up they went on the mood board," he said.

Not until deeper exploration, prompted in part by the Black Lives Matter protests, did he realize what he was looking at was from Gee's Bend, which he name checked in his 2021 collection, with a portion of proceeds going to the Souls Grown Deep Foundation to preserve and promote Black artwork in the South.

While designers are called out regularly by social media sites for cultural appropriation (including recently, the New York brand SEA, for using Hawaiian quilting without giving credit), Lauren said this collaboration was not a response to any call-out, but more about personal introspection. (No doubt, it is also a next-gen response to his Uncle Ralph and others appropriating Native American imagery and textiles, among other things.)

"I don't want to indict other designers," he said when asked about that. "I believe in approaching our relationships with other communities, with marginalized communities, in a more responsible way than it's been done before. With this we set out to create a proper model through which creatives should and can collaborate with artists and artistic communities, and one that is about volition and consent."

Lauren worked with Souls Grown Deep and with apparel industry innovator Nest to make contact with Gee's Bend and forge a relationship. Then he set up a Zoom conversation with the quilters to see if they were interested in making panels using fabric Lauren provided, knowing that the panels would become garments.

"So there would be a clear idea of what their work would be used for. That was important for me because creatives and designers for a long time have used others' work, especially when the work is relegated to folk art or found art or a vintage piece," he said. "Whether something was created by a known celebrated artist or not, a person used their ingenious artistic ability to put two colors next to each other, to choose fabrics, to stitch, to create the emotional response for those who see it. That has to be recognized and appreciated."

Each quilter came back with choices of fabric, and was sent a quilting kit with yardage and bins of scraps, from tweeds to men's wear suiting to nylon to denim and workwear.

Pettway communicated that the community wanted not only recognition, but compensation and financial participation in the final product. So they were compensated first for the panels. All of the profits from sales of the collection will also go back to Gee's Bend. Lauren asked Bergdorf Goodman to place a proper order of pieces, and 10 percent of their profits will also go to the community.

"Proper and equitable collaborations are not easy, and they don't necessarily make financial sense to a company, but you have to do it to create a better model," said Lauren, explaining that the quilters were also involved in giving feedback on how the 276 panels were used.

The resulting 93 garments, priced commensurate to the artwork at $5,000 to $10,000, will be in the Bergdorf Goodman men's store through Nov. 8. "Combining brown and cream herringbone and houndstooth with orange twills and nylons and bold blue linens, it's incredible. They opened my eyes to textiles I've known my entire life," said Lauren.

The immersive installation features the quilters' portraits, their voices in recordings where they discuss the process, and editorial-style collection images shot in L.A. with input from Pettway on casting and styling. "She's the most authentic person and creative I've worked with," the designer added. "We had fun," she laughed.

Each piece has the quilter's signature on the outside, and bio stitched into the lining. "That to me is what this is about," said Lauren, who plans to continue the collaboration and hopes it sparks others to tap into the community's skills. "We can talk about appropriation and what has been done, but what is exciting to me is what's being done."

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Moore From L.A.: Greg Lauren and Gee's Bend Quilters Take Aim at Cultural Appropriation

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Ralph Lauren may have built an apparel empire out of romantic interpretations of Americana, but his nephew Greg Lauren is giving credit to authentic American creators with a new collaboration with the quilters of Gee's Bend.

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In 1998, an art collector named William Arnett arrived in Wilcox County, Alabama. Over the next two years, he went door to door in the African-American hamlet of Gee's Bend, asking women if he could see their quilts: vivid, off-kilter assemblages of worn denim, outgrown school dresses and other salvaged bits of cloth, particular to Gee's Bend and nowhere else.

Most of the 275 residents of Gee's Bend are descendants of slaves from once-thriving cotton plantations. At the time of Arnett's first visit, a serious art collector was an unlikely presence on their doorsteps, not least because Gee's Bend is so far off the beaten path-a tangle of red dirt roads and overgrown fields nestled into a deep arc of the Alabama River. There are no stores or offices; just trailers, retired barns, and houses built for a short-lived economic program by the Roosevelt administration, some 40 miles from the nearest pharmacy.

For years, Arnett, a native Southerner, collected Asian art, then African art, and ultimately, African-American art from the South. He saw quilts from the Bend in a Civil Rights-era photography book, and became determined to track down their makers.

To the women he would meet-Annie Mae Young, Mary Lee Bendolph, Lucy T. Pettway, and dozens of others-quilts were much loved, given as gifts on most every occasion, and made for everyday use: blankets, curtains, floor coverings.

To Arnett, they were graceful, honest works of art. They represented the hardship endured by that community, from slavery, to sharecropping, tenant farming, and the harrowing upheavals of the civil-rights struggle. History was spelled out in each one: in worn materials torn from old work clothes, in batting of cotton lint salvaged from the fields, in unexpected color palettes and their inspired riffs on traditional patterns, handed down and uniquely interpreted by hundreds of women across generations.

Over the coming years, he would purchase dozens of their masterpieces for $200 to $300 a piece-10 to 20 times the going rate, often a relative windfall for the makers, many of whom were seniors, subsisting on Social Security checks, and living well below the poverty line. He was determined to introduce their work into the existing narrative of contemporary American art.

And, to the extent that one man can affect the art world, he succeeded.

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Throughout the mid 2000s, the quilts were shown around the country at the Smithsonian, the Whitney, and other major American art museums from Atlanta to Minneapolis to San Francisco. They were widely written about in the press, drawing frequent comparison to Klee, Rothko, and Mondrian, and emblazoned on a limited-edition series of United States postage stamps. The quilt makers, who had not previously thought of themselves as artists, rode buses from Alabama to the early New York openings, dressed in their Sunday best, to see the quilts that had once kept their children warm in the winters displayed before throngs of museum-goers.

Work by Young, Bendolph, and others appeared on coffee mugs, designer scarves, VISA Gift Cards, rugs and lampshades by Sports Illustrated model turned entrepreneur Kathy Ireland, and as replicas available for $298 a pop at Anthropologie.

Some of the artists-and their children-saw the fervor around the quilts, and wondered why their share of a supposed fortune had not materialized. And if you've been to that tangle of red dirt roads on the Alabama River, you'd understand why.

Last year, Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, visited the region, and told an Alabama news outlet that he had not previously been aware of conditions of this severity in the developed world. A number of homes are without septic systems. The post office was closed some years ago, after the postmaster became ill from black mold. It was from this disparate vantage that, in 2007, a small handful of women filed lawsuits against Arnett, challenging their history of handshake agreements-work exchanged for cash with no paperwork nor contract.

Funds that were set aside in escrow from the proceeds of the licensing and other activities, and that were intended to benefit the community at large, instead went to settling the lawsuits, benefiting only the plaintiffs and dividing the community.

Many were grateful for Arnett's efforts, and, satisfied with having sold the quilts to him in the first place, saw no need for litigation. "I have no real beef with [the Arnetts], other than the fact that they just wasn't organized in my sense," said Rubin Bendolph. He helps promote the work and legacy of his mother, Mary Lee Bendolph, now 83 and living beside her daughter-also a quilt maker-in Gee's Bend. "They brought [the quilt makers] out of the darkness," Mr. Bendolph said, "and into the light so that people could see who they are and what their stories were."

After the lawsuits, one change did take hold: Everyone in Gee's Bend had learned the term copyright -a set of rights inherent to the creator of an artwork that gives control over how images and reproductions of the work are used, and creates a pathway to licensing fees.

"I sold quilts, I got paid for 'em. In that sense, I'm like Walmart." says Mary Margaret Pettway, quilt maker and lifelong resident of Gee's Bend. "The bonus is the copyright, which we did not know we had, or we were entitled to." Pettway lives in a worn trailer at the end of a steep, dirt driveway; when we spoke, she was quilting in the corner of a community center that serves a daily free lunch to seniors.

As a general matter, copyright is inherited, like any part of one's estate-an immaterial heirloom. In some countries, like Australia, artists receive royalties on a resale, so if a quilt were purchased for $200 and next sold to a museum for $20,000, the artist would benefit, receiving some percentage of the increase. In the United States, at least for now, there are no resale royalties; copyright can police only the most egregious instances of appropriation, paying scant dividends on use of images of the work. But at least, as Ms. Pettway puts it, "it acknowledges the quilter."

Many Bend residents have little to pass on to their children but their quilts. If those quilts were long ago removed to hang on the walls of a museum in a faraway city, the copyright attached means that they can still, in an abstract way, be handed down. In the absence of a final will and testament by the artist, copyright is inherited along pathways of descent that vary state by state. In Alabama, if someone like Ms. Pettway has no living descendants-children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren-copyright transfers to her siblings. If all siblings are deceased, it rolls to their direct descendants. If no siblings, then it would be divided among grandparents, aunts, and uncles, and next to their descendants. If none of those people are living, claim of copyright is awarded to the state of Alabama until the work passes into the public domain, 70 years after the death of the artist.

Pettway leans over her quilting frame, hand-stitching a recreation of her mother Lucy's Birds in the Air (1981). "Basically," she says, "we're living history. We're being taught everywhere." Painter Amy Sherald, who created Michelle Obama's official presidential portrait for the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, included a reference to that very quilt in the first lady's dress. This makes Pettway proud.

Even so, if we're talking about exploitation, she said, the quilt makers have never been more exploited than they are now. In an era of commercialization, globalization, and social media, there are plenty of imitations, and a veritable craze of quilts and goods that are #geesbendinspired across Instagram and Etsy. These are created by artisans who no doubt appropriate the aesthetic of Gee's Bend-but do so in a manner that is entirely disconnected from its origin.

Now, William Arnett is retired, and the William S. Arnett collection-more than 1,100 works of art by 160 African-American artists from the South, including 120 quilt makers-is managed by an Atlanta-based nonprofit formed by the Arnetts in 2010: the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Since 2014, the foundation has been dedicated to placing the works, by gift or purchase, into the permanent collections of leading art museums.

More importantly for the artists, with each acquisition, the foundation's four-person staff takes steps to reconnect the quilt makers with news of and plans for their work, ensuring that they are set up to dictate how images of their work are used, and to receive any income, however modest, from such usage.

Of course, in a place like Gee's Bend, there are challenges in administering these benefits, not limited to long searches for some of the living heirs, sometimes even requiring the engagement of private investigators.

Consider the case of quilt maker Magalene Wilson, who passed away in 2001 at age 100. "Interestingly, up until last week," says Souls Grown Deep's Scott Browning, "we thought her name was 'Magdelene.'" That's how she was credited over a decade of exhibition and publication of work.

Mary McCarthy, who came to Gee's Bend with the civil-rights movement in the 1960s, works with Souls Grown Deep repairing quilts, and serves informally as the Bend's local historian. She recently sent Browning a picture of Wilson's headstone, revealing the error in the spelling of her name. He confirmed "Magalene" in census and Social Security records, but her date of birth remains unclear: "The Gee's Bend books list it as 1898," he says, "her grave marker as 1900, the US Social Security Death index as 1897, while the US Social Security Applications and Claims Index has it as 1901."

The next step is to track down Wilson's heirs, which can be complicated for the same reasons, in many cases compounded by the nature of surnames in a community with roots in slavery. Historically, slaves took the name of the plantation on which they worked, and in Gee's Bend, after the departure of Joseph Gee and the dispersal of his slaves, the Pettway family ran the largest plantation in the area. Of the 120 quilters on the foundation's list, no fewer than 50 share the last name Pettway, though they may not be related by blood. You'll find many Youngs and Williamses in the Bend for the same reasons.

Accordingly, it has sometimes taken years for the foundation to locate all of the heirs who would divide one artist's copyright between them. In this case, Browning was days from hiring a private investigator. It took him weeks, and the on-site help of Ms. McCarthy and Ms. Pettway, to locate Gwendolyn "Zu" Pettway, the granddaughter of Wilson's brother, and seemingly her last living relative.

Zu Pettway is now aware that she owns copyrights. But those rights will require enforcement.

Few publishing houses, museums, and other institutions-however prestigious-are eager to pay for usage for an image. Enter the Artists Rights Society, which represents the intellectual property rights of over 80,000 artists and estates, from Frida Kahlo to Andy Warhol to Le Corbusier. Souls Grown Deep approached ARS to track requests, review contracts, process payments, and pursue usage opportunities for the artists in the Arnett collection. With the addition of Zu Pettway to the ARS roster, the rights of 61 of the 120 quilt makers on Browning's list are now represented. But it is a constant, everyday battle to make sure that images aren't used without permission, and that when copyright fees are owed, the artists get paid, and fairly.

Today, Scott Browning is retracing William Arnett's steps, knocking on quilt makers' doors in the Black Belt's sweltering late summer heat. He arrives at Flora Moore's trailer, on a dirt lane not from far where she has lived since 1951.

Moore was one of many quilt makers who traveled with the Arnetts to the early museum openings-the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and Milwaukee Art Museum. "I was surprised and so happy to see my work on the wall," she said over the roar of the A/C unit in her living room. "Really, to tell you the truth, now, we were so excited to see some of them. Started crying and talkin' about, 'Ooh, we took that and made that from nothing and now look how people got us up here.' Made us feel good."

Browning points to one of Flora's quilts in a large hardcover book. "You remember that one right there."

Moore pulls back and laughs, as if seeing an old picture of herself.

"So this is going into the permanent collection of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Then you probably recognize that one." He points to another. "That we're gifting to the Fine Arts Museum at Spelman College." It's a great honor, Browning tells her, so he was here to share that news, to make sure she knew where her work was going, "and another thing that we've been talking to people about," he continues, "is copyright."

Moore had heard the term before, when news of the lawsuits buzzed through the neighborhood. "Copyright this, copyright that.... One of my cousins tried to get me-you know those quilts you just got through showin' me?-He told me, 'You can put a lawsuit against this.' I told him, 'I ain't puttin' no lawsuit against [the Arnetts]; they've been too good to us to put a lawsuit against them."

"Now, it's not a fortune," Browning assures Moore. He walks her through examples of artists whose quilts appeared in the exhibition catalog at the de Young museum in San Francisco. They received $75 each. Artists with work on coffee mugs at the gift shop received $350. For deceased quilters, living heirs would be asked for their approval of the image use, and then would divide that sum among them.

"Well, I want to become a member." Moore signs the contract Browning handed her, bringing the number of quilters represented by ARS up to 62. "Something's better than nothing!"

While the dollar amounts are small, and unlicensed artifacts like "Quilts of Gee's Bend" greeting-card sets are sold to this day at Black Belt Treasures gift shop right across the river, the significance of the contract Moore just signed is not. Copyright protection by the Artists Rights Society is the first time the quilters have had a lasting connection to the work they sold, or any agency in its usage, since it left their homes.

"I'm happy," Moore said, "because you just sit down and just think all the things you have done that you can't see no more. It's nice to know somebody's thinking about me and trying to bring some of my quilts back and let me look at them again."

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In 1998, an art collector named William Arnett arrived in Wilcox County, Alabama. Over the next two years, he went door to door in the African-American hamlet of Gee's Bend, asking women if he could see their quilts: vivid, off-kilter assemblages of worn denim, outgrown school dresses and other salvaged bits of cloth, particular to Gee's Bend and nowhere else.

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When enslaved women from the rural, isolated community of Boykin, Alabama-better known as Gee's Bend-began quilting in the 19th century, it arose from a physical need for warmth rather than a quest to reinvent an art form. Yet by piecing together scraps of fabric and clothing, they were creating abstract designs that had never before been expressed on quilts.

These patterns and piecing styles were passed down over generations, surviving slavery, the antebellum South, and Jim Crow. During the Civil Rights movement in 1966, the Freedom Quilting Bee was established as a way for African-American women from Gee's Bend and nearby Rehoboth to gain economic independence. The Bee cooperative began to sell quilts throughout the U.S., gaining recognition for the free-form, seemingly improvisational designs that had long been the hallmark of local quilt design. As awareness grew, so did acclaim, and the quilts entered the lexicon of homegrown American art.

Since then, quilts from Gee's Bend have been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and others. In 2006, the U.S. Postal Service even issued ten commemorative stamps featuring images of Gee's Bend quilts.

Now, this distinctly American tradition is receiving yet another honor. This year, three of the most respected Gee's Bend quilters have been awarded 2015 NEA National Heritage Fellowships: Mary Lee Bendolph, Loretta Pettway, and Lucy Mingo, all of whom claim a long quilting lineage. Artists, educators, and memory keepers, these women ensure their art form will continue to be celebrated by future generations. You can read more about them here, and make sure to tune in on Friday evening for our NEA National Heritage Fellowships Concert. As a special concert sneak peek, whet your appetite with these gorgeous images of quilts crafted by Bendolph, Pettway, and Mingo.

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When enslaved women from the rural, isolated community of Boykin, Alabama-better known as Gee's Bend-began quilting in the 19th century, it arose from a physical need for warmth rather than a quest to reinvent an art form. Yet by piecing together scraps of fabric and clothing, they were creating abstract designs that had never before been expressed on quilts.

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African American quilts in the vicinity of the Alabama River (possibly Gee's Bend), Wilcox County, Alabama. Photograph attributed to Edith Morgan, circa 1900. Image courtesy Souls Grown Deep Foundation

At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the quilters of a small, rural town in Alabama founded the Freedom Quilting Bee. The woman-led cooperative used their craft skills to establish new forms of income and expand their quilting audience.

Gee's Bend, Alabama, is home to generations of extraordinary Black craftswomen, who represent a crucial chapter in American art history.

Since the early 1800s, quilters in the area have created original patterns from clothing, sacks, and fabric remnants using techniques passed down from mother to daughter. In 1966, after decades of exploitative sharecropping and racial discrimination, approximately sixty Gee's Bend quilters seized an opportunity to send their artistry outside their community and formed the Freedom Quilting Bee. This female-led artistic cooperative put Gee's Bend quilts in front of national audiences through art auctions, commercial partnerships, and museum exhibitions. Through its commissions, quilters secured resources such as electric lines and telephones, washing machines, school supplies, and transportation.

The timeline below tells the story of Gee's Bend and the journey of women creating their own way despite adversity to share their vision and support themselves and their community.

1816
North Carolina landowner Joseph Gee and 18 people enslaved by him settle in a south-central area of Alabama along a river bend, and Gee establishes a cotton plantation. The region, Gee's Bend, still bears his name.

Map of Gee's Bend, Alabama. Image courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

1845
Joseph Gee and his brother give their relative Mark Pettway the plantation as part of a settlement. Pettway expands the plantation, enslaving more than 100 people on the land. He assigned his last name to many of the enslaved workers, and this surname is still common in the region.

1863
The Emancipation Proclamation declares enslavement illegal. Many African Americans previously enslaved on the Pettway plantation work the same land as sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

Lucy Pettway based her pattern Housetop (above) on the wooden rafters of a typical quilter's home in Gee's Bend. Loretta T. Pettway. Housetop. c. 1970. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation; and purchase with exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., BMA 2020.33. © 2021 Lucy T. Pettway / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Late 1920s
The price of cotton drops and the Great Depression begins. Several sharecropping farmers in Gee's Bend go into debt.

1937
The Farm Security Administration establishes Gee's Bend Inc., a cooperative program created for local families to purchase land and build homes. After this, many African Americans who lived in the region control the land they worked for the first time.

Girlie Pettway's Diamond in Square quiltis also called an Economic Block pattern because it was the most popular design of the Depression. Girlie Pettway. Diamond in Square. c. 1950. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation; and purchase with exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., BMA 2020.34. © Artist or artist's estate

1949
The area called Gee's Bend is legally declared Boykin, although many residents continue to refer to it as Gee's Bend. The census reported 1,206 residents in the larger Wilcox county area in 1940.

July 2, 1964
The Civil Rights Act was passed, which banned segregation and discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, gender, and national origin. At the time, African Americans were only 2 percent of registered voters in Alabama, despite being more than half of the population.

1965
Martin Luther King Jr. preaches at Pleasant Grove Baptist Church in Gee's Bend. During his visit, women of Gee's Bend show Dr. King examples of their quilts. He encourages them to register to vote in the upcoming election and participate in the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

Freedom Quilting Bee, women around quilt. Birmingham, Ala. Public Library Archives, 255.4.2

February 18, 1965
Demonstrations for civil rights continued, as people attempted to gain access to voting rights while memorializing those injured and imprisoned for speaking out against discrimination. During one evening in Marion, Alabama, police disrupted a vigil, and demonstrators fled to seek safety in a local cafe. Among them was a young man named Jimmie Lee Jackson who was shot and killed while trying to protect his mother from being beaten by law enforcement. This was one of the major catalysts for the continuing marches and demand for civil rights, particularly in Alabama.

March 7, 1965
John Lewis led the first march of about 600 people from Selma over the Edmund Pettus bridge. They encountered law enforcement on the other side of the bridge and had to turn back due to the large amount of violence that ensued and became known as Bloody Sunday. It gained attention around the country for the unjust acts against protestors.

March 21-25, 1965
Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis lead a four-day march of 25,000 people from Selma to Alabama's capital in support of equal voting rights. Gee's Bend community experienced first-hand voter suppression when the ferry service that connected the small town to Campden was shut down to discourage people from voting and make access to supplies more difficult.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King, James Bevel, and others walking in the rain during the Selma to Montgomery March, March 25, 1965. Nelson Malden Civil Rights Era Photograph Collection, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Q1399. Photograph by Montgomery City Police

Then he [Martin Luther King Jr.] stood out there on the ground, and he was talking about how we should wait on a bus to come and we were all going to march. We got loaded on the bus, but we didn't get a chance to do it, 'cause we got put in jail.
Annie Mae Young, Gee's Bend quilter, 1966

August 6, 1965
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act banning discriminatory voting practices such as literacy tests. He appointed Federal examiners to enforce equal access to voting.

September-October 1965
The Selma Inter-religious Project (SIP) is established as a collaboration between local civil rights groups and the government. The four sponsors are the Synagogue Council of America; divisions of the National Catholic Conference for Inter-racial Justice; the National Council of Churches of Christ; and the Unitarian-Universalist Association.

Francis X. Walter, an Alabama native and Episcopal priest, is named the executive director of SIP. After seeing several quilts hanging outside in Gee's Bend, he proposes that the quilters sell their works to generate income andincrease Black women's participation in the Civil Rights Movement.

March 26, 1966
About sixty quilters from the Gee's Bend area establish the Freedom Quilting Bee, led by Estelle Witherspoon. The Freedom Quilting Bee is named to communicate it is open for anyone to join. Funds accumulated from group quilting commissions are consolidated and deposited back into the community.

Loretta Pettway created Four-Block Strip from worn-out men's clothes. Loretta Pettway. Four-Block Strip. c. 1960. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation; and purchase with exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., BMA 2020.32. © 2021 Loretta Pettway / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

March 27, 1966
The first Freedom Quilting Bee art auction is held in a photographer's studio in New York. It is a huge success. All but 5 of over 100 quilts sold.

April 2, 1966
The Freedom Quilting Bee is legally incorporated as a nonprofit cooperative association. The officers include Estelle Witherspoon as president, Minder Coleman as vice-president, Addie Nicholson as secretary, and Mattie Ross as treasurer.

Quilts Auction Poster, Freedom Quilting Bee second auction at The Community Church of New York, May 24, 1966. In Nancy Callahan, The Freedom Quilting Bee, The University of Alabama Press, 1987

May 24, 1966
A second quilting auction is held in New York at the Community Church of New York. More than $2,000 is raised and sent to Gee's Bend to help fund home goods, refrigerators, and even college tuition. On average, the quilts sold for a dollar more than in the first auction.

December 1966
The Freedom Quilting Bee enters into a contract with design firm Parish-Hadley. The first order is for the Chairman of the Colombia Broadcasting Company, William Paley, and his wife, Babe. The request is for an orange-yellow patchwork using the Chestnut Bud design, created by Lucy Mingo. The completed order was 75 feet finished on March 1, 1967.

Chestnut Bud created by Lucy Mingo, who learned to quilt from her mother and relatives.
Lucy Mingo. Chestnut Bud. 1960s. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation; and purchase with exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., BMA 2020.31. © 2021 Lucy Mingo / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

March 8, 1969
The Freedom Quilting Bee begins construction on The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Sewing Center that will function as an office and studio. People from all over are invited to celebrate. By the summer of 1969, the building was complete.

Nell Hall Williams' Blocks and Strips, 1971. The work is an original pattern of pieced fabric, including brown corduroy, likely leftover from the Sears company commission.
Nell Hall Williams. Blocks and Strips. 1971. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation; and purchase with exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., BMA 2020.35. © 2021 Nell Hall Williams / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

September 1972
A long-term contract is arranged between Sears Roebuck and the Bee for corduroy pillow shams. These items are simpler and could be made more quickly than the quilts. They are sent to seven of the thirteen distribution centers, including Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Memphis, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Kansas City. Over 100,000 are created in a little over a decade.

In just six years, Gee's Bend quilting designs and techniques shift from an independent craft passed from mother to daughter in the Black community of Gee's Bend, Alabama, to a nationwide style.

Lucy T. Pettway making a corn shuck rug (Image: John Reese, 1980)

2012
The Freedom Quilting Bee officially disbanded a year after the last original board member, Nettie Young, passed away. Although the Bee itself disbanded, the area is still recognized worldwide for its cultural influence.
Stella Hendricks served as the Souls Grown Deep Foundation intern at the BMA 2019-2020 while earning her undergraduate degree in sculpture from Towson University.
She Knew Where She Was Going: Gee's Bend Quilts and Civil Rights was on view at the BMA from March 10 - September 13, 2021. Reservations are required. Plan your visit at artbma.org.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to correctly identify Girlie Pettway (American, c. 1898-1955) as the quilter who created the Diamond in Square quilt pictured.

Callahan, N. (1987). The Freedom Quilting Bee. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Fire Ant Books.

Klein, C. (Jul, 18, 2020). How Selma's 'Bloody Sunday' Became a Turning Point in the Civil Rights Movement

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Stanford University. Jackson, Jimmie Lee

Quilts Full of Culture From the Women of Gee's Bend, Etsy.com.

Rural Development Leadership Network. Freedom Quilting Bee.

Scheper-Hughes, N. (2004). Anatomy of a Quilt: The Gee's Bend Freedom Quilting Bee. Southern Cultures, 10(3), 88-98. doi:10.1353/scu.2004.0040

University of Alabama, Digital Media Center. With Fingers of Love Freedom Quilting Bee.

Wallenfeldt, J. (2020, July 28). Selma March.

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A Timeline of The Freedom Quilting Bee - BMA Stories

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At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the quilters of a small, rural town in Alabama founded the Freedom Quilting Bee. The woman-led cooperative used their craft skills to establish new forms of income and expand their quilting audience. Gee's Bend, Alabama, is home to generations of extraordinary Black craftswomen, who represent a crucial [...]

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Passing By: Four Quilters From Gee's Bend

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Passing By: Four Quilters From Gee's Bend

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Passing By: Four Quilters From Gee’s Bend — THE BOTT COLLECTION

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Gee’s Bend quilter Louisiana Bendolph worked with us later that year, completing four prints. One of her prints was also donated to FAPE (Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies).

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Gee's Bend Quilters: Industry | Craft in America

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Gee's Bend Quilters: Industry | Craft in America

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Gee's Bend and the Oriole Mill: Time and Textiles | Craft in America | PBS LearningMedia

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Gee's Bend and The Oriole Mill: Time and Textiles explores the history and relationships between artists and textiles, various forms of fabric construction, the marketing and use of textiles, and the personal relationships of artists and textiles. Students will design and construct a pieced textile.

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Mary Ann Pettway, Gee’s Bend Quilters | PBS LearningMedia

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Mary Ann Pettway, Director of the Gee’s Bend Quilter’s Collective, recounts the history of the Gee’s Bend Quilters. This group of Alabama women has gained national and international acclaim for their work in carrying on the tradition of quilt making. The Gee’s Bend Quilters were featured in the 2012…

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Two women from Gee's Bend recall civil rights era, talk about famous quilts

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Two women from Gee's Bend recall civil rights era, talk about famous quilts

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HUNTSVILLE, AL -- It was plates of fried chicken, pinto beans, collard greens and yams; the food of the day. It was quilts stitched, in part, from swatches of clothing that were outdated and outgrown.

It was two women from Gee's Bend, a southwest Alabama community famous for quilting, at a bookstore in northeast Huntsville on Saturday. It was Fannie Etheridge, manager of the Freedom Quilting Bee, and Nettie Young, the last of the bee's original quilt-makers.

It was both of them talking about history on the last weekend of Black History Month, both of them explaining how the civil rights movement was wrapped in the fabric of these quilts.

The Freedom Quilting Bee was born in 1966, during the last years of the movement.

In 1965, the year of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Gee's Bend, the isolated river community in Wilcox County, about 50 miles from Selma.

"We were marching, marching to get our freedom," Young said. "They hadn't freed us yet. But we got freed under Martin Luther King. We walked together, marched together, talked together, hugged one another."

They hugged, as she recalled, because they were talking about freedom - freedom that she and King were seeking in the Selma-to-Montgomery march, a march of about 60 miles for voting rights and other freedoms.

"He talked about white children and black children walking hand and hand one day," she said. "He told us not to fight back (in Selma), fall to our knees, go to praying and all the guns would drop. And that prayer worked. They dropped their guns beside them."
Coming together
After the Selma-to-Montgomery march, an Episcopal priest, Francis X. Walter, drove to Wilcox County and saw the quilts dangling from clotheslines.

With their bold patterns and bright colors, the quilts were so striking to Walter that he wondered if they could have a role in the movement. Perhaps the quilters in Gee's Bend and the area around Selma could come together to fund civil rights projects?

Thus, the Freedom Quilting Bee was formed on March 26, 1966, at the Antioch Baptist Church in Camden, the seat of Wilcox County.

The first sewing center was named in honor of King. Within two years, the bee landed a $20,000 contract with Bloomingdale's, a major New York department store.

To this day, the history of the bee is still being written, and it's being told in art museums and other settings in Alabama, like The Book Store on Winchester Road in Huntsville.

"I just learned three or four years ago that Martin Luther King gave the first donation to start the Freedom Quilting Bee," Etheridge said.
Bookstore event
Etheridge and Young were in Huntsville on Saturday because Cassandra Wilson, owner and manager of The Book Store, had grown up with the legend of the quilt makers.

Wilson is a native of Alberta, just north of Gee's Bend.

"We've got history right here," she said. "We decided to celebrate it here."

The celebration began Saturday afternoon at her bookstore. Crock pots of yams, pinto beans and collard greens simmered just beside a large tray of fried chicken.

Fifty or so people were present, many taking photos of Young, 92. The store turned quiet when it was her turn to speak.

"I got my first paycheck from the quilting bee," she said. "I was so glad to have a check written in my name. I'd never had a check written in my name."

The check, Young said, came after the bee signed a contract with Sears. From then on, she was making $150 a week.

"Y'all don't know where I came from, and I want people to know where I came from," she said. "I enjoyed it - I really did. I thank God from what I've come through. If y'all don't know what blessed is, this is blessed."

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Two women from Gee's Bend recall civil rights era, talk about famous quilts

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"We were marching, marching to get our freedom," said 92-year-old Nettie Young, the last original Gee's Bend quilter. "They hadn't freed us yet. But we got freed under Martin Luther King. We walked together, marched together, talked together, hugged one another."

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Women who’ve made Gee’s Bend quilts are finally receiving their due

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Women who’ve made Gee’s Bend quilts are finally receiving their due

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Women who've made Gee's Bend quilts are finally receiving their due

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Quilt-making in Gee's Bend, Alabama, has a long history steeped in tradition, and now the women behind the pieces of art are getting the recognition they deserve. NBC's Blayne Alexander has this week's Sunday Spotlight.

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SOULS GROWN DEEP INVESTS IN GEE’S BEND, ALABAMA, THE HOME OF GENERATIONS OF QUILTMAKERS

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SOULS GROWN DEEP INVESTS IN GEE’S BEND, ALABAMA, THE HOME OF GENERATIONS OF QUILTMAKERS

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Souls Grown Deep Invests in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, the Home of Generations of Quiltmakers

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Souls Grown Deep (SGD) is planning to help revitalize Gee’s Bend, Alabama—the home of multiple generations of quiltmakers, many of which are represented in the organization’s collection. Established to promote the work of African American artists from the South, SGD has already succeeded in spo…

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UNCONVENTIONAL GEOMETRIES: A VISIT TO GEE’S BEND

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UNCONVENTIONAL GEOMETRIES: A VISIT TO GEE’S BEND

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The Aesthetics of Joy by Ingrid Fetell Lee

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Last week I was intrigued to read that Michelle Obama's choice of dress in her official portrait as First Lady might be an homage to the quilters of Gee's Bend. I first wrote about these artworks in 2009, and fell so much in love with them that when I was researching , I decided to make a trip to Alabama to meet some of the quilters and see where they live and work. It was a fascinating visit, and since I was only able to include part of what I learned in the book, I thought I'd share a bit more here.

Even if you're not familiar with Gee's Bend, you can probably see just by looking that these are no ordinary quilts. They flout traditional principles of order and symmetry, yet they have an undeniable sense of balance. Gee's Bend quilts have been hailed as abstract artworks on a par with many paintings that hang in contemporary art museums. They could be easily compared with the work of Ellsworth Kelly or Paul Klee. And since a collector named William Arnett began to draw attention to them in the 1970s, the quilts have garnered attention and praise, some selling in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Yet these works of art are all the more remarkable because they didn't come out of ateliers run by professional (mostly white) male artists with assistants and generous commissions. They were created by African-American women, mothers and farmers and laborers, many living in wrenching poverty, who designed their quilts in their heads while picking cotton, shelling beans, feeding, dressing, and chasing after children. For these women, quilting was both a practical necessity and a joyful escape.

It is also one of the most intimate forms of art. As collectors William and Paul Arnett write, "the quilt safeguards the body during its greatest vulnerability, sleep." Many Gee's Bend quilts were made from old clothes, and as such they kept memories of loved ones alive long after they were gone. They were almost like a precursor to a scrapbook, yet one that is an indispensable part of daily life.

Gee's Bend isn't hard to visit, but it is a bit of an isolated place, so it's a good idea to plan ahead. Set in a bend in the Alabama River, Boykin is a tricky town to get to. There's a ferry you can take from nearby Camden, but I chose the land route, about a 2-hour drive from Montgomery, so I could go through Selma and see the Edmund Pettus Bridge. If you plan on making the journey, I recommend packing a lunch, as there's nowhere except a small grocery once you get to County Road 29. (Or stop at the Side Porch in Selma on your way out for delicious sandwiches.)

Many of the original generation of quilters have passed away, and their kids have moved out to cities like Mobile and Montgomery. The town, now known as Boykin, had a population of 275 at the last census, and I'd be surprised if it's even that now. Still, there is a group of quilters who carry on the tradition. I arranged a visit with Mary Ann Pettway, the manager of the Gee's Bend Quilt Collective.

It's hard to miss the Quilt Collective, a big white building to your left as you enter the town. Mary Ann wasn't there yet, but another quilter named Nancy Pettway kindly kept me company while I waited. She offered me a remedial education in quilting (and kindly didn't quiz me on what I managed to retain!), using the quilts on the walls and racks to talk me through different approaches. She prefers to quilt by tearing, rather than cutting, pieces of fabric, which lends both ease and unpredictability to the process.

After awhile, Nancy had to head down to the Boykin Nutrition Center, where quilters sometimes work together, and invited me to come along. There I met another quilter, Lucy Marie Mingo, who was 84 years old. Mingo treasures her labor-intensive Pine Burr quilts, which have a three-dimensional texture not unlike that of a pinecone, and sometimes take up to six months to make. She learned how to make them from her cousin, another quilter named Pinkie Pettway. The first time she saw a Pine Burr quilt, she says, "I loved it so, I couldn't leave." So she came back the next day with some pieces of fabric and Pinkie taught her how to make it. Still, Mingo also appreciates the undemanding nature of string quilts, which are made from bars of fabric, often laid side-by-side in a loosely striped arrangement. (The red, pink, and violet quilt by Jessie T. Pettway, shown above, is an example of a string quilt.) "You can just take a string quilt and tear the strings like you want 'em," she said.

"As I say, rip and sew," Nancy chimed in.

After spending a little while at the Nutrition Center, I headed back to the collective. Mary Ann Pettway was there, working on several different quilts, and she was kind enough to let me look on as she pieced a new section together. Her aunt is Mary Lee Bendolph, one of the most famous of the Gee's Bend quilters (whose story is worth a click through, if you have the time), and looking at their work together you can immediately see the resemblance. Both quilters have an energetic style that feels active and alive. "Little small pieces, you can't hardly see 'em!" said Mingo with admiration, describing Mary Ann's technique.

Watching Mary Ann take pieces from a pile and fit them into a composition, I felt a bit of the same thrill as when you snap a jigsaw puzzle piece into place or, in a very mundane example, see a Tetris piece lock neatly into its spot. It was a process of making order out of disorder, of finding harmony in what seems to the naked eye like noise. I think it helps explain why these quilts feel so joyful. The human eye has an uncanny ability to detect patterns and find balance, even within milliseconds of seeing an object or artwork. We often think of balance as equivalent to symmetry, and symmetrical objects are often delightful. But even when a composition is asymmetrical, our brain can unconsciously detect whether or not it is balanced. Some researchers call this property dynamic balance, perhaps because it feels more active than a purely symmetrical design. We find joy in looking at these quilts I think because they create an unlikely sense of harmony: they look quirky and spontaneous, but underneath that whimsical appearance is a joyful sense of balance, and this combination is deeply satisfying.

While I was there, Mary Ann showed me a picture of a quilt the collective made for the Obamas in 2008. She proudly pointed out the three squares she had made in the vivid composition. While it's not clear if Michelle Obama intended to reference Gee's Bend with her choice of gown for her official portrait painted by Amy Sherald, or whether it was just coincidence, there's a pleasure in seeing an echo of these artworks, whose purpose is not about bringing joy to the rarified space of an art museum, but rather to the cozy spaces of everyday life.

Visit: find more information on visiting Gee's Bend here.

Images: Header image, from left: "Thousand Pyramids" Variation, Annie Bendolph; Housetop, Lucy T. Pettway; Medallion, Loretta Pettway; Housetop, Qunnie Pettway; courtesy of Souls Grown Deep Foundation / Stephen Pitkin. Top image: Portrait of Michelle Obama, Amy Sherald, and "Roman Stripes" variation, Loretta Pettway. Second image: Bars and String-Pieced Columns, Jessie T. Pettway, and "Chinese Coins" Variation, Arlonzia Pettway. All other images by the author.

If you liked this post, you can read more about the Gee's Bend quilters in my book , out September 4th from Little, Brown. Sign up here for updates!

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Unconventional Geometries: A Visit to Gee's Bend - The Aesthetics of Joy by Ingrid Fetell Lee

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Last week I was intrigued to read that Michelle Obama's choice of dress in her official portrait as First Lady might be an homage to the quilters of Gee's Bend.

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Gee’s Bend Quilting Comes Into Fashion, but How Are These Brand Partnerships Working for the Artisan Community?

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Gee’s Bend Quilting Comes Into Fashion, but How Are These Brand Partnerships Working for the Artisan Community?

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Gee’s Bend Quilting Comes Into Fashion, but How Are These Brand Partnerships Working for the Artisan Community?

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When Gee’s Bend quilting makes its way to the Met Gala — fashion is definitely paying attention.

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Interview with the Quilters of Gees Bend

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Interview with the Quilters of Gees Bend

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Interview with the Quilters of Gees Bend

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Famed Gee’s Bend Quilters are now on the runway and online

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Famed Gee’s Bend Quilters are now on the runway and online

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Famed Gee’s Bend Quilters are now on the runway and online

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The Innovative Quilt Makers of Gee’s Bend Created a New Canon

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The Innovative Quilt Makers of Gee’s Bend Created a New Canon

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This small community in Alabama has been forging its own unique blend of stitched abstraction for years. What began as an exercise in making beauty out of necessity has become a multigenerational art form.

They say that nothing happens in isolation, but for the quilt makers of Gee's Bend, Alabama, the community's remoteness certainly has something to do with the explosive creativity that has been fostered there for generations. Since the mid-nineteenth century, this group of African-American women have produced incredible textiles that are infused with a distinct form of abstraction, informed by the call-and-response of singing traditions, the rooftops of their surrounding neighbourhood, and the myriad textures found among the discarded workwear and second-hand fabric scraps used as source material.

The fact that these quilts are made from such unassuming items makes them all the more astounding and points to an impulse to create, no matter how hard that might be. As influential Gee's Bend maker Mary Lee Bendolph explains, "I didn't have nothing to piece the quilt with [...] anything I could find-a scrap piece-I put it in the quilt if Mama wasn't using it. It didn't matter what it was, as long as it was something to go in. I remember picking a piece from out in the road; it was a raggly old shirt what the wagon had rolled over [...] I washed all the mud out of it and hung it on the wire. When it got dry, I put it in the quilt."

What began as an exercise in making beauty out of necessity (the quilts were historically used to keep warm at home) has become a multigenerational art form that marries spirituality, ancestral legacy and community (stitching is largely a group activity), not to mention an exceptional command of colour, form and compositional rhythm. By combining well-known quilting techniques with a specific blend of "controlled improvisation", each maker creates something distinct and mesmeric, and every bit as complex as the European modernists who were once reconceiving line, colour and space thousands of miles away.

Despite their unending state of production, it has taken time for these quilt makers to gain recognition in the wider world, with names like Lucy T Pettway, Mary Lee Bendolph and Nettie Young slowly making their way into museum collections. This is widely thanks to Souls Grown Deep, a foundation that is dedicated to supporting and disseminating the work of artists in the American South.

Curator Raina Lampkins-Fielder explains that, "We really want to look at the reasons for disenfranchisement, for systemic racism, for the world not being able to see these artists." She also adds that, as a remote, rural community with a largely Black population, Gee's Bend still remains poor and marginalised. Recognition, she insists, must come hand-in-hand with resources and infrastructure.

One such initiative comes in the form of an auction conceived with apparel manufacturer American Giant and Nest, a not-for-profit that is dedicated to building a new "handworker" economy that protects women's labour rights and preserves cultural tradition. Eighteen Gee's Bend quilters have produced their own take on the stars and stripes, building on the community's long history of civil rights activism. With each artist being paid upfront and receiving 100 percent of the sale profits, the auction is but one way to directly support the women and their craft.

Other projects come in the form of an ambitious scheme to revive the Gee's Bend Quilt Trail, in the hope of building something of an arts destination, with cultural tourists bringing a much-needed boost to the economy, not unlike the minimalist art enclave that is Marfa, Texas. Souls Grown Deep is currently working with the University of Alabama Center for Economic Development and the design agency Pentagram, to revive and preserve markers that offer individual context for artists who have widely been cited as a single quilt-making group.

What is more, further investment from Nest means it is now easier for artists to sell their quilts online and licence their images, thus offering another valuable stream of revenue and recognition. There is even the opportunity to become involved in the physical making process, with the Gee's Bend Quilting Retreats, led by China Pettway and Mary Ann Pettway, inviting guests to assemble their own quilts with their expert tuition.

Finally, academic research spearheaded by Souls Grown Deep is opening up new connections between the women of Gee's Bend and the better-known members of their collection, such as Thornton Dial and Lonnie Holley, who are both hugely influenced by them. These networks of creativity are celebrated in the exhibition We Will Walk, at Turner Contemporary (until 6 September), which places the textiles on equal footing with assemblage sculptures, carved structures and paintings.

When viewing these works, it is important to remember that even exhibiting a quilt as an art object is a relatively new notion. Historically, stitched and fabric-based practices have been identified solely as "craft", which in turn has been erroneously viewed as a second-tier artform.

It is no coincidence that objects of use, made by the hands of women, have so often been relegated as lesser, in the same way that works by Black artists are so often exoticised and othered. The canon still overwhelmingly supports the vision of a singular genius, who for centuries exclusively inhabited the body of a white male. The living legacy of the Gee's Bend quilt makers wholly refutes this notion and exemplifies just how intrinsic Black, female labour is to the story of American creativity.

Gee's Bend Flag Quilts

In collaboration with American Giant and Nest, until 31 August

VISIT WEBSITE

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The Innovative Quilt Makers of Gee's Bend Created a New Canon - ELEPHANT

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This small community in Alabama has been forging its own unique blend of stitched abstraction for years. What began as an exercise in making beauty out of necessity has become a multigenerational art form.

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There have been hundreds of quilts created in Gee's Bend, Alabama since the early 20th century, and these masterpieces have become some of the most iconic textiles of the American South. To create them, the quiltmakers of Gee's Bend draw upon creative vision, patterns from the world around them, and African American quilting traditions, which have been passed down by generations of Gee's Bend women. These traditions emerged from the necessity of keeping families warm in unheated quarters and homes, so the quilts were seen as functional objects rather than works of art. However, functional though they are, they are also imbued with meaning and full of bold compositions and skillful improvisations. These quilting traditions also showcase resourcefulness in materials with the use of recycled fabric remnants, feed sacks, and well-worn clothes. The visible stains, discoloration, and fading of these reclaimed materials all serve as reminders of the life the fabrics lived before they became quilts.

Art historians, curators, and collectors now recognize the work of Gee's Bend quilters as essential to the history of American art. The permanent collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts houses the work of thirteen Gee's Bend quilters: Jennie Pettway, Nettie Young, Louella Pettway, Lucy T. Pettway, Ruth Kennedy, Creola Bennett Pettway, Linda Pettway, Nell Hall Williams, Mary Lee Bendolph, Rita Mae Pettway, Loretta Pettway, Linda Diane Bennett, and Louisiana Bendolph.

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There have been hundreds of quilts created in Gee's Bend, Alabama since the early 20th century, and these masterpieces have become some of the most iconic textiles of the American South. To create them, the quiltmakers of Gee's Bend draw upon creative vision, patterns from the world around them, and African American quilting traditions, which have been passed down by generations of Gee's Bend women.

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Art Made Place: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend

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Art Made Place: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend

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By Ben Schulman
Boykin, née Gee's Bend, and still better known as such, is a hidden hamlet in Alabama's Black Belt. The African-American community sits on a teardrop of land, hugged - and isolated - by the Alabama River. Its history wears the scars of its plantation past. Many residents carry the surname, Pettway, a direct tie to former plantation owner, Mark Pettway. A United Nations envoy toured the greater area in 2017, shocked at the lack of basic infrastructure he found, noting the conditions as something that "We haven't seen in the first world." The markers of poverty, disinvestment and governmental neglect are manifest.

But Gee's Bend does not want for attention.

Since the 1930s, outsiders have been continuously transfixed by the cultural output of Gee's Bend. In 1937, as the community was being transacted and subdivided by the federal Farm Security Administration, and plots of the former plantation were being offered to descendants of the slaves who worked the land, the New York photographer Arthur Rothstein visited to capture the lives of residents. A few years later, the folklorist Robert Sonkin, in the spirit of Alan Lomax, recorded the songs and stories of the community.

In the 1950s, and through the 1960s, people noticed the quilts being made there, and have been noticing ever since. (It was during this time that increased notice of the distinct Freedom Quilting Bee cooperative, based in Rehobeth, AL, also grew.) The quilts of Gee's Bend are large, intricately designed, woven pieces of folk art, often spreading over 80 x 70 inches. The craft, traded down through generations, goes back to the mid-19th century, the tools of the trade a discerning eye, strips of cloth and needle.

There are dimensions within each quilt. The varied styles and approaches employ the same sort of abstract artistry as Op Art figures like Bridget Riley, the visual punch of Mondrian's "Broadway Boogie Woogie," a firm Americana folk aesthetic, and at heart, a practical application.

"My mother made quilts to keep us warm," says Mary Margaret Pettway, a lifelong Gee's Bend resident and quilter. "We would use what we had [to make the quilts]. Sometimes, it was old worn-out clothes. If you had enough money, you could buy a piece of fabric, maybe at a Goodwill or some place like that. And sometimes we had boxes that would come in - donations of clothing, and we would separate what we could wear from what could be used."

Pettway is an Alabama Humanities Foundation fellow and an encyclopedia of the quilting tradition. "Nowadays, [our process] is kinda short-cutted because we use sewing machines and we have readymade batting," she says, referring to the insulation of the quilt. "The convenience of this is that we don't have to do a patchwork back unless you want to. But the process really hasn't changed too much, because we're still hand-quilting."

Pettway is also the chair of the New York-based Souls Grown Deep Foundation. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation was founded in 2010 with a mission of "documenting, preserving, and promoting the contributions of African-American artists from the South, and the cultural traditions in which they are rooted." The foundation grew out of the collection of art historian, William S. Arnett. Its cultural cachet is strong; alongside Pettway, Jane Fonda sits on their board. Their institutional muscle and clout has preserved and promoted forms of vernacular American art that have often been overlooked by the art establishment, helping to enshrine works in the collections of major American and international art museums.

"The first eight years of the foundation was focused on bending the arc of art history," says Scott Browning, the foundation's director of collections. "We collected over 1500 pieces from over 150 artists in 14 Southern states, and to date, we've placed 400 works by over 100 artists in 20 places."

This recognition of forgotten or overlooked artists and art forms broadens the cultural conversation about what constitutes art and whose voice is represented as an artist. In short, the art establishment can bestow a degree of validation. The quilts of Gee's Bend have been found in museums across the country. The U.S. Postal Service issued a series of stamps celebrating Gee's Bend quilters. But validation is empty if it is not tied directly to provide awareness of and benefits to the creators.

"It's harder and harder to ignore the critical and economic acclaim and the disconnect between people and places behind the art itself," says Browning. "I've had the experience of visiting quilters and telling them that your work is now in the permanent collection of the Met - which relative to the needs of the artists is like saying, 'Congrats, your quilt is on the moon.' The question is often, 'Does that come with any money?,' and for many reasons, that answer is often no."

Pettway would like to see that changed, as would Souls Grown Deep. One of the organization's more recent initiatives, the Souls Grown Deep Community Partnership, is to leverage, "the attention we get on the museum side to bring resources to the communities and people where the art generates," says Browning.

"I want to see Gee's Bend as a tourist destination," says Pettway. "However, if people do come down here to visit, there's nowhere for people to stay. You'd be very hard-pressed to leave money in Gee's Bend because there are no stores. I would love to see buildings here capturing the history of the area, capturing the history of the quilts. I would love to see a place with all the pictures of the quilters, at least holding one of their creations. At this point, I would be happy to get an online presence."

"We want to help get things out of the Bend and into the economy," says Maxwell Anderson, the president of Souls Grown Deep. "We receive multiple requests to purchase quilts; we want to help create a lasting mechanism that allows the transaction to happen."

Anderson hopes the Souls Grown Deep Community Partnership can develop, in tandem with community residents, a cultural tourism plan that addresses both the digital and physical realm and bridges the divide between the renown for the work of the community, often had at a remove, and the people that produce it. "The infrastructure is so remote," he says, referencing not only the material conditions of the area but the State of Alabama and its Department of Tourism's difficulties in building off of and promoting the cultural assets of its residents.

"The first thing that's needed is to put signs in the ground," Anderson says. Souls Grown Deep has engaged Pentagram, the design firm behind iconic wayfinding systems such as WalkNYC, to envision signs and markers that can be embedded in the landscape. The signs will broadcast the story of Gee's Bend and its people, while also helping visitors find their way there. Anderson, echoing Pettway, says there needs to be somewhere people can congregate and purchase quilts, perhaps some food - somewhere that can receive money and keep it local.

There is a delicate balance between appreciation versus appropriation, and the potential loss of cultural agency. "There is a well-deserved skepticism when people, particularly white people, come in and say, 'We're going to tell you what's wrong and how to fix it,'" says Browning.

"The aspiration is to provide a more nuanced experience of a place," Anderson says, while being mindful not to set in motion the mechanics of the "theft of creative heritage."

As works of art, the quilts of Gee's Bend provoke a sense of awe. As cultural artifacts, they are visceral representations of resilience. Both views are incomplete, and fail to address the most pressing concern for a still-vital, still-living folkway. "How can the visual history of Gee's Bend be shaped into actual resources for the community?," Browning asks.

How can the recognition of the artistic value of a quilt provide to its creators as much as a quilt provides itself?

"A quilt is whatever you want it to be," says Pettway. "The older quilts used to be cut up for canning purposes. They used to be used for children to spread around before they started walking and crawling. Sometimes they would be used for rugs. They are versatile things.

"It seems like everybody is interested in the quilts now. It's also called art."

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Art Made Place | The Quilts of Gee's Bend, AL - Just Place

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By Ben Schulman Boykin, née Gee's Bend, and still better known as such, is a hidden hamlet in Alabama's Black Belt. The African-American community sits on a teardrop of land, hugged - and isolated - by the Alabama River. Its history wears the scars of its plantation past.

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Featuring fascinating interview

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Opinion | The Master Quilters of Gee’s Bend, Ala. (Published 2018)

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A close-knit group of rural African-American women have perfected a distinctive art.

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Beyond the Bauhaus: The Gee's Bend Quilters

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Beyond the Bauhaus: The Gee's Bend Quilters

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Since the early part of the 1900s, the women of Gee's Bend, Alabama have narrated and re-written their lives through the creation of quilts. Gee's Bend (also known as Boykin) is a small, rural, predominantly African-American community in Wilcox County, Alabama. The town, which sits enclosed on three sides by the Alabama River, takes its name from a plantation owner named Joseph Gee, who settled the town and built his cotton plantation on the land in the early 1800s. With him, he brought a group of eighteen enslaved African Americans. Today, almost all of Gee's Bend residents are descendants of formerly enslaved people from Gee's plantation.

After Emancipation, formerly enslaved people from the plantation were given land in the area. Already isolated and impoverished, conditions in Gee's Bend became even worse in the 1930s when a merchant who had given credit to many of the community members passed away. Eager to collect on the debts, his family broke into homes and forcibly took livestock, seeds, tools, and other possessions, leaving most people in the area with nothing. At this point, with few resources, the community was considered the poorest community in the United States.

It was in this context that women from Gee's Bend began a long and lasting quilting tradition. Quilts were made first and foremost out of necessity. The women needed to keep themselves and their families warm, but had little access to material. To solve this they began recycling scraps of fabric from worn clothing and feed sacks. The results were bold both in color and in pattern. While some women made quilts that followed more "traditional" and ornate quilting patterns, many others began to deviate and create their own designs. In place of the convention of small pieces of fabric pieced together with small stitches, the women of Gee's Bend used larger, asymmetric shapes and more visible stitching. Denim and feed sacks were placed in contrast and partnership with floral and corduroy. Rather than follow a pattern, many women created the designs as they went along, creating what many recent critics and art historians have dubbed an "improvisational" style of quilting. However, it's important to note that this did not mean the women lacked guiding vision.

The quilting tradition of Gee's Bend has been passed down from generation to generation, not only from mother to daughter, but also between community members. In an interview, Mary Lee Bendolph remembered how she would take inspiration from other Gee's Bend women's quilts: "I see other people's quilts like when the spring of the year comes. The women would hang their quilts out, and we would just go from house to house looking at the people's quilts. And I would take a pattern from looking at their quilt and try to make one like it." This practice of artistic dialogue through observation and modification extended inside their homes as well, where women would showcase their quilts on beds and couches for company to see, and comment on quilts they found particularly beautiful.

Bettie Bendolph Seltzer

In "But a quilt is more: Recontextualizing the Discourse(s) of the Gee's Bend Quilts," Vanessa Kraemer Sohan rightly asks us to see the quilts as produced outside and within the boundaries of other quilting traditions, particularly other African American quilting traditions. The Gee's Bend tradition is also ever-evolving-growing from multiple traditions, but always re-made and re-formed by the individuals of each generation, as well as their respective circumstances.

What is significant about these quilts, in addition to their aesthetic power, is the way in which they reflect and have transformed the lives of the women who create them. They archive life.

In 1942 Missouri Pettway created a quilt out of her late husband's clothing. At a distance, the quilt consists of an array of bold, irregular rectangles in muted grays, blues, reds, and whites. Small diagonal stitches hold the pieces together, creating a subtle counter pattern. But upon closer examination, you see rust stains and dirt, bleeding dye, and sun-bleached patches. Pettway's daughter remembered the quilt saying, "Mama say, 'I going to take his work clothes, shape them into a quilt to remember him, and cover up under it for love.' She take his old pants legs and shirttails, take all the clothes he had, just enough to make that quilt..." The viewer can imagine the moments that might lead to each discoloration and mark. In addition to a stunning composition of abstract aesthetic relationship between colors and shapes, this quilt archives a narrative of her and her husband's shared life together.

A major shift in the economic and social fabric of Gee's Bend occurred during the Civil Rights movement with the formation of the Freedom Quilting Bee (FQB), cooperative of poor black craftswomen in the Alabama Black Belt. The women of Gee's Bend were brought in to create work for Sears. This provided the women with materials and more access to distribution of their work. It also brought with it expectation of more streamlined patterns. The ways in which the women resisted or accommodated the FQB point to the multiple and ever-changing circumstances that effect tradition.

Circumstances for the women and recognition for their work changed dramatically again in 1998 when art historian and curator, William Arnett, ran across an image of a Gee's Bend woman named Annie Mae Young in a book on quilts. The image depicted Young next to a pile of logs over which was thrown a quilt made up of denim patches with a red, yellow and brown center. Arnett was enamored and headed to Wilcox County to find Young and her quilt. He was successful in his venture, and purchased the quilt from Young for $2000 (the average going rate for her quilts at that time was between five and fifteen dollars). Thus began his relationship with the women of Gee's Bend, and the emergence of the women's work in a "high" art arena.

After his initial visit, Arnett, who specialized in "vernacular" African-American art, went on to purchase an estimated 700 quilts over the years from the women of Gee's Bend. With these, he organized exhibitions at cultural institutions throughout the country, including the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and an extremely popular exhibition at the Whitney.

Polly Bennett

These exhibitions situated Mary Lee Bendolph, Annie Mae Young, Loretta Pettway, and the other Gee's Bend women as discrete counterparts to European modernist artists like Henri Matisse and Paul Klee who also used bold color and abstraction in their work. Once in a museum context, their work was re-evaluated, based on this new connection with "high" art and relation to White male European modernists. The exhibitions also initiated conversations about the distinction between "art" and "craft." As curator Alvia Wardlaw said, "The quilts reflect the history of [Gee's Bend] and of this country and ask all of us to consider genius...where does it reside?" These popular exhibitions brought much-deserved attention to the quilts and the women who created them. Reviewers, art historians, and visitors praised the "improvisational" style of the women's work, the bold color choices, and the way they deviated from "traditional" quilting while simultaneously creating a new aesthetic language and genre of quilting all their own.

Mary Lee Bendolph

But these exhibitions, and the story of Gee's Bend quilters also illuminate the fine (and sometimes not so fine) line between exposure and exploitation. The women's work was given a broad stage and has been celebrated throughout the United States and beyond as works of genius, thanks in large part to Arnett. However, the financial profits gleaned from this recognition have not always filtered back to the women, or the community of Gee's Bend. Images of the quilts have been reproduced on coffee mugs and calendars, scarves and refrigerator magnets.

The womens' reactions to Arnett and others profiting from their work was mixed. While some women appreciated the recognition and the purchase of their work at far above the previous going rate, others were upset that their work was being profited on without their consent. Loretta Pettway and Annie Mae Young both filed lawsuits against Arnett on the grounds that they had been cheated out of thousands of dollars in proceeds from their work and copyrights.

After winning various copyright disputes, an organization called X gained the rights to the work, ensuring that the Gee's Bend quilters receive proper compensation for the reproduction of their work. In addition to being aesthetically powerful, these quilts and the myriad stories behind them are important because they ask us to reconsider our aesthetic value system. More than that, they serve as maps of an American history that is often un-narrated.

Quilters of Gees Bend

These quilts were a way in which women in the community both reflected and also transformed their material and social circumstances. Today, the women of Gee's Bend continue to elaborate on their storied tradition. About 40 women from the community are part of the "Gee's Bend Quilting Collective" which is managed by Mary Ann Pettway and housed in a small building in town. Here, women continue to produce and sell quilts often for up do $1000 apiece. The Quilting Collective also holds annual quilting retreats where participants can learn to quilt or practice their quilting skills with the guidance of Mary Ann Pettway and China Pettway.

Considering the example of these previously unknown innovators and artistic geniuses, we as educators in the design community can take a lesson from the women of Gee's Bend and consider:

How does the dominant Euro-centric, patriarchal framework limit the ways we conceive of genius and creativity?

What happens when we include the richness of context, history, and community into our design aesthetic?

How can we expand our love of the visual arts to connect to more inclusive stories and a broader vision of humanity?

How can we enrich and ground our aesthetic vision through connection to our historical selves and acknowledging the unseen histories that have shaped our society and culture?

Images courtesy of SoulsGrownDeep.org

Links
https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/gees-bend-quiltmakers https://www.arts.gov/art-works/2015/quilts-gees-bend-slideshow https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fabric-of-their-lives-132757004/ https://www.pbs.org/video/alabama-public-television-documentaries-quiltmakers-of-gees-bend/ www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/opinion/quilts-while-i-yet-live.html https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/gees-bend-quilt-alabama/ https://www.geesbendquiltingretreats.com/gees-bend-quilting-collective.html www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/us/29quilt.html https://search.proquest.com/docview/217826677?accountid=14512 https://www.jstor.org/stable/4137873?pq-origsite=summon&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents www.diaryofaquilter.com/2020/06/the-quilts-and-quilters-of-gees-bend.html https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/gees-bend-quiltmakers https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/annie-mae-young/work/work-clothes-quilt-center-medallion-strips https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/missouri-pettway/work/blocks-and-strips-work-clothes-quilt https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/gees-bend-quilt-alabama/ https://thesewingmachineproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_5618.jpg https://www.arts.gov/art-works/2015/quilts-gees-bend-slideshow https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/lucy-p-pettway https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/lucy-t-pettway/work/snowball-quiltmakers-name

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Beyond the Bauhaus: The Gee's Bend Quilters | AIGA Design Educators Community

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Since the early part of the 1900s, the women of Gee's Bend, Alabama have narrated and re-written their lives through the creation of quilts. Gee's Bend (also known as Boykin) is a small, rural, predominantly African-American community in Wilcox County, Alabama. The town, which sits enclosed ...

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Like other people who speak through song, murals, books, and movies, disaster quilters give expression to human loss and renewal. Whatever the context, quilting brings people, especially women, together, building community solidarity and enriching the lives of those who give as much as those who rec…

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You Can Now Buy a Piece of American Art History on Etsy

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You Can Now Buy a Piece of American Art History on Etsy

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Quilts made by the women of Gee's Bend, Alabama, are, according to The New York Times, "Some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced." They've been immortalized on U.S. postage stamps and hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When Amy Sherald painted Michelle Obama's stunning official portrait, she said that the quilts of Gee's Bend inspired her depiction of the first lady's dress.

And yet the women quilters of Gee's Bend-most of whom are descendants of enslaved people forced to work on the Gee family's cotton plantation-have reaped few financial rewards, despite decades of acclaim. Quilts bearing the Gee's Bend name may have graced museum walls from the Smithsonian to the de Young in San Francisco, but the majority of households in the town have an income of under $10,000 a year, Bloomberg reported in 2018. Part of the problem is that the quilting collective hasn't been able to monetize their art. Gee's Bend, officially known as Boykin, is far from a tourist destination; it's surrounded on three sides by the Alabama river, underfunded and isolated.

That's not an accident. In 1962 white politicians shut down the Gee's Bend ferry to prevent Black residents from voting. "We didn't close the ferry because they were Black," the sheriff reportedly bragged. "We closed it because they forgot they were Black." Martin Luther King, Jr., visited Gee's Bend three years later. "I came over here to Gee's Bend to tell you, you are somebody," he told the fired-up crowd, which included Gee's Bend civil rights quilters who participated in the famed Freedom Quilting Bee.

But the government didn't think so-the ferry service stayed defunct, and Gee's Bend was inaccessible except by 40-mile rural car ride for four decades. Images of Gee's Bend quilts have literally been printed on Visa debit cards, but the town is hardly a shopping destination. Basics like grocery stores and even consistent sanitation are lacking, let alone hotels.

Enter Etsy.

Soon, the online site where you bought everything cute in your apartment will also sell the world-renowned quilts of Gee's Bend. Etsy is partnering with the quilting collective, as well as the Southern arts-advocate nonprofit Souls Grown Deep, and the women-arts-worker-focused nonprofit Nest, to enable the women to sell on a global online platform. It's fitting-Etsy is a place where women in particular have created small businesses selling, often, beautiful versions of practical objects.

Doris Pettway Mosley, 61, is a seventh-generation Gee's Bend resident. She grew up watching her mother and other ladies in the neighborhood go house to house in groups, quilting. "Most everybody down here is family," says Pettway Mosley, who regularly works a full-time job and quilts in her free time, laying fabric over her lap and focusing on her pattern late into the night. She can complete a quilt by herself in a week, she says. And she's already at work on the eighth generation of community quilters: "I have a grandbaby-sometimes I give her a needle and let her have her way with it," she says, laughing. "Sometime she do good and sometime she don't."

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You Can Now Buy a Piece of American Art History on Etsy

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Quilts made by the women of Gee's Bend, Alabama, are, according to The New York Times , "Some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced." They've been immortalized on U.S. postage stamps and hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Can Gee’s Bend—the Tiny Alabama Community Behind America’s Most Dazzling Quilts—Become an Art Destination to Rival Marfa?

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Can Gee’s Bend—the Tiny Alabama Community Behind America’s Most Dazzling Quilts—Become an Art Destination to Rival Marfa?

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In a review of the Whitney Museum of American Art's landmark 2002 exhibition of quilts from Gee's Bend, critic Michael Kimmelman New York Times described the textiles as "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced." The quilts, he wrote, were "so eye-poppingly gorgeous that it's hard to know how to begin to account for them."

Since then, these dazzling geometric artworks have traveled around the globe, been reproduced on official US postage stamps, and become broadly recognized as an important part of American art history.

But back in Gee's Bend-the tiny Alabama hamlet formally known as Boykin that has nurtured three generations of quiltmakers-the impact of the quilts' renown has been more subtle.

According to the most recent US Census, 20 percent of the area's roughly 300 residents, a significant number of whom are active in the quilting community, live below the poverty line. The median annual household income is under $16,000.

"We don't have a store, a gas station, not even a red light down here," Mary Margaret Pettway, a third-generation quilter and Gee's Bend resident, tells Artnet News. "If you came down, you'd be hard pressed to try to leave money [behind], even if you wanted to."

That may soon begin to change, however. A new initiative spearheaded by Souls Grown Deep, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the work of African American artists from the South, aims to transform Gee's Bend into a tourist destination.

"It's a thriving community that continues to create," says Raina Lampkins-Fielder, the curator of Souls Grown Deep. "We're looking at why these artists might be disenfranchised to ensure they find their rightful place within the canon, but also that they are supported on the ground level."

The thinking goes: If Marfa, the pint-size Texas town located a three-hour's drive from the nearest airport, can become a site for pilgrims seeking to commune with Donald Judd's Minimalist art, why can't Gee's Bend become a magnet for art historians, craft enthusiasts, and American history buffs who want to know more about the source of the world's most acclaimed quilts?

Opening Up the Bend

A series of initiatives, some of which have been in the works for years in collaboration with local residents, will be formally announced today. The first is a collaboration with Nest, a nonprofit that promotes handmade crafts, which will work to make Gee's Bend quilts more accessible for purchase online and enable Gee's Bend quiltmakers to license their work for reproduction. Additional projects may include the development of a cultural center, a hub for quilting workshops, a marketplace for locally sourced goods, walking trails, cottages for people to stay, and community-run Airbnbs.

The project also includes funding to maximize local participation in the 2020 census (including providing public internet access so community members can fill out the forms online), which organizers hope will allow the historically under-counted population fairer access to federal resources. Another important component is resurfacing the history of individual quilters. Even when the US Postal Service released its Gee's Bend stamps in 2006, Lampkins-Fielder notes, the artists were not identified by name.

"There has been this tendency of just grouping the quiltmakers as 'the quiltmakers' and not naming them as individual artists, which flies in the face of what is done in museums," she says. To address this oversight, the organization will work with quilters, their families, and the leading graphic design consultancy Pentagram to revive and expand the Gee's Bend Quilt Trail, which marks the homes of leading quilters.

Lampkins-Fielder says that Souls Grown Deep's work in Gee's Bend will have an impact not only on the community itself, but also on a chapter of art history that remains under-explored. Better known Southern artists, such as Thornton Dial and Lonnie Holley, for example, were aware of and inspired by the work of the Gee's Bend quilters-connections that scholars are only just beginning to examine.

An Uphill Battle

No transformation of Gee's Bend would be easy. For decades, the small hamlet has suffered from poverty and isolation, which is partly a product of geography: the community is nestled in a literal bend in the Alabama River and is surrounded by water on three sides, making it almost an island.

But its isolation is also a function of systemic racism. The first paved road leading into and out of town was laid down in 1967-around the same time that ferry service was suspended in an effort to keep the local black population from crossing the river to register to vote.

Ferry service was restored in 2006, but most Benders must still drive hours to get to and from their jobs. (When we spoke, Pettway was on her way back from dropping off her daughter at work an hour away.) "Right now, there are very few jobs here [in Gee's Bend]," says Pettway, who is also Souls Grown Deep's board chair.

Initiatives like the revival of the Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy, a community organization tasked with restoring and reopening a building formerly operated by quilters, would offer welcome employment opportunities as well as a gathering place for creatives (who currently work independently at home) and those who want to take workshops or study with them.

Nobody involved in the initiative expects Gee's Bend to transform into the kind of hipper-than-thou hotbed that Marfa has become-nor do they want it to. "There won't be any G6s landing-this is a bus trip," says Maxwell Anderson, the president of Souls Grown Deep.

But he maintains that the community could conceivably become a regular stop on tours of the American South undertaken by those interested in the history of Civil Rights-especially people drawn to Alabama because of its new Legacy Museum and National Memorial to Peace and Justice.

For her part, Mary Margaret Pettway is already picturing a new future for Gee's Bend.

In 10 years, "virtually every house would have a marker, and people can go and tap their smartphones and pull up information about that quilter," she imagines. "It would be something to see. We are living history."

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Can Gee's Bend-the Tiny Alabama Community Behind America's Most Dazzling Quilts-Become an Art Destination to Rival Marfa?

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In a review of the Whitney Museum of American Art's landmark 2002 exhibition of quilts from Gee's Bend, critic Michael Kimmelman New York Times described the textiles as "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced." The quilts, he wrote, were "so eye-poppingly gorgeous that it's hard to know how to begin to account for them."

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Loretta Pettway – U.S. Department of State

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Gee’s Bend is a small rural community nestled into a curve in the Alabama River southwest of Selma, Alabama. Founded in antebellum times, it was the site of cotton plantations, primarily the lands of Joseph Gee and his relative Mark Pettway, who bought the Gee estate in 1850. After the Civil War, th…

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Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," September 8-November 10, 2002, unnumbered cat. (p. 52; lent by the Tinwood Alliance, Atlanta).

New York. Whitney Museum of American Art. "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," November 21, 2002-March 9, 2003, unnumbered cat.

Mobile, Ala. Mobile Museum of Art. "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," June 14-August 31, 2003, unnumbered cat.

Milwaukee Art Museum. "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," September 27, 2003-January 4, 2004, unnumbered cat.

Washington, D.C. Corcoran Gallery of Art. "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," February 14-May 17, 2004, unnumbered cat.

Cleveland Museum of Art. "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," June 27-September 12, 2004, unnumbered cat.

Norfolk, Va. Chrysler Museum of Art. "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," October 15, 2004-January 2, 2005, unnumbered cat.

Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," February 13-May 8, 2005, unnumbered cat.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," June 1-August 21, 2005, unnumbered cat.

Auburn, Ala. The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University. "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," September 11-December 4, 2005, unnumbered cat.

Atlanta. High Museum of Art. "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," March 25-June 18, 2006, unnumbered cat.

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," July 15-November 12, 2006, unnumbered cat.

Orlando Museum of Art. "Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt," January 28-April 22, 2007, unnumbered cat. (p. 144; lent by the Tinwood Alliance, Atlanta).

Baltimore. Walters Art Museum. "Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt," June 17-August 26, 2007, unnumbered cat.

Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale. "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," September 6, 2007-January 7, 2008, unnumbered cat.

Denver Museum of Art. "Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt," April 13-July 6, 2008, unnumbered cat.

Philadelphia Museum of Art. "Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt," August 2-October 2, 2008, unnumbered cat.

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "History Refused to Die: Highlights from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift," May 22-September 23, 2018, unnumbered cat. (pl. 46).

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Loretta Pettway | Medallion quilt | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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the artist, Gee's Bend, Ala.(until 1999; in 1999 to Arnett); William S. Arnett, Atlanta (1999-2002; his gift in 2002 to Tinwood Alliance); Tinwood Alliance, Atlanta (2002-10; transfer in 2010 to Souls Grown Deep); Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta (2010-14; their gift to MMA)

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Lists all of the quilt makers with information about them

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The residents of Gee's Bend, Alabama, are direct descendants of the enslaved people who worked the cotton plantation established in 1816 by Joseph Gee. After the Civil War, their ancestors remained on the plantation working as sharecroppers. In the 1930s, the price of cotton fell, and the community faced ruin. As part of its Depression-era intervention, the Federal Government purchased ten thousand acres of the former plantation and provided loans enabling residents to acquire and farm the land formerly worked by their ancestors. Unlike the residents of other tenant communities, who could be forced by economic circumstances to move-or who were sometimes evicted in retaliation for their efforts to achieve civil rights-the people of the Bend could retain their land and homes. Cultural traditions like quiltmaking were nourished by these continuities.

Most Gee's Bend residents accordingly did not participate in The Great Migration, during which over six million African Americans from the rural South journeyed to the cities of the North, Midwest, and West from about 1916 to 1970. By remaining in Alabama, most were not afforded the opportunity to become participants in the burgeoning American middle class, the wellspring of opportunity for many of the artists today recognized in the global art market.

In the 1960s, spurred on by Martin Luther King Jr's visit, community members became active in the Civil Rights Movement, ferrying to the county seat at Camden to register to vote. Authorities reacted by eliminating ferry service altogether, effectively isolating the community and cutting it off from basic services. During this period, local women came together to found the Freedom Quilting Bee, a workers cooperative that provided much-needed economic opportunity and political empowerment.

Throughout this time, and up until the present, the settlement's unique patchwork quilting tradition that began in the 19th century has endured. Hailed by the New York Times as " some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced," Gee's Bend quilts constitute a crucial chapter in the history of American art and today are in the permanent collections of over 30 leading art museums.

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The residents of Gee's Bend, Alabama, are direct descendants of the enslaved people who worked the cotton plantation established in 1816 by Joseph Gee. After the Civil War, their ancestors remained on the plantation working as sharecroppers. In the 1930s, the price of cotton fell, and the community faced ruin.

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Gee's Bend on Display: Quilts Entering Museum Collections 2014 - 2021

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I recently finished one of the most personally fulfilling projects that I have ever worked on. I was asked to make 65 American flags at 4′ x 6′ out of recycled Levi's jeans, one for every store. The project was inspired by the quilts of Gee's Bend and I took it on with so much excitement I could barely contain myself. I haven't had the attention span to sew in the past, so this was more of a challenge than usual. I bought an industrial sewing machine, brought on two great assistants, and got to shredding jeans.

Below is a little bit of history around the amazing women of Gee's Bend who gave me the stamina and attention to detail to create these beautiful pieces. I will forever be in awe of this tiny town of artists.

Arthur Rothstein, Sewing a quilt. Gee's Bend, Alabama, 1937. Courtesy of The Library of Congress

From the Quilts of Gee's Bend site:

Gee's Bend is a small rural community nestled into a curve in the Alabama River southwest of Selma, Alabama. Founded in antebellum times, it was the site of cotton plantations, primarily the lands of Joseph Gee and his relative Mark Pettway, who bought the Gee estate in 1850. After the Civil War, the freed slaves took the name Pettway, became tenant farmers for the Pettway family, and founded an all-black community that was very isolated from the surrounding world. During the Great Depression, the federal government stepped in to purchase land and homes for the community, bringing strange renown - as an "Alabama Africa" - to this sleepy hamlet.The town's women developed a distinctive, bold, and sophisticated quilting style based on traditional American (and African-American) quilts, but with a geometric simplicity reminiscent of Amish quilts and modern art. The women of Gee's Bend passed their skills and aesthetic down through at least six generations to the present. In 2002, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in partnership with the nonprofit Tinwood Alliance in Atlanta, presented an exhibition of 70 quilt masterpieces from the Bend. The exhibition, entitled "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," is accompanied by two companion books, The Quilts of Gee's Bend, and the larger Gee's Bend: The Women and Their Quilts, both published by Tinwood Media, as well as a documentary video on the Gee's Bend quilters and a double CD of Gee's Bend gospel music from 1941 and 2002.

The "Quilts of Gee's Bend" exhibition has received tremendous international acclaim, beginning at the show in Houston, then at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and other museums on its twelve-city American tour. Newsweek, National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation, Art in America, CBS News Sunday Morning, PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, the Martha Stewart Living television show, House and Garden, Oprah's O magazine, and Country Home magazine are among the hundreds of print and broadcast media organizations that have celebrated the quilts and the history of this unique town. Art critics worldwide have compared the quilts to the works of important artists such as Henri Matisse and Paul Klee. The New York Times called the quilts "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced."

Lutisha Pettway (American, 1925-2001) "Bars" work-clothes quilt, ca. 1950 Denim and cotton 80 x 84 inches The Collection of the Tinwood Alliance Photo courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art

Essie B. Pettway (b. 1956)

As you can see, the quilts are amazing, I wanted the flags to have a similar feel, handmade, worn in and with the attention to detail of someone who thought of nothing else till the project was done.

strips cut from jeans, ready to be sewn together

A glimpse into Antlre headquarters during the height of flag production

there is denim on every surface in the studio

a pile of the aftermath

10 bags of zippers and pockets to donate

we oxidized the grommets and pounded them in 1 by 1

Antlre flags for Levis windows

I was looking for a way to show the entire scope of this project. It took us about 4 months, 3000-ish pairs of Levi's, a severe case of denim infused bronchitis and a new found love for the sewing machine. Special thanks goes out to Sarah Snyder of www.littlebunny.net, who was an amazing help throughout this process.

We had a blast putting together this video to s
how you the scale of the project. If you are extra patriotic try not to be offended by the fact that they are on the grass, it is out of love and lack of other space big enough that I do this.

Filmed by Fernando Cepeda

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I recently finished one of the most personally fulfilling projects that I have ever worked on. I was asked to make 65 American flags at 4′ x 6′ out of recycled Levi's jeans, one for every store. The project was inspired by the quilts of Gee's Bend and I took it on with so much excitement I could barely contain myself.

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Watch: The quilters of Gee’s Bend sewed masterpieces out of old rags

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Watch: The quilters of Gee’s Bend sewed masterpieces out of old rags

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These black women from rural Alabama created celebrated folk art

For many years, the only way to get to Gee's Bend, Alabama was by ferry. The isolated black hamlet survived slavery, share-cropping, the Great Depression, and floods. In the Civil Rights era, a vindictive sheriff cut off even the ferry service. But the community - the town is now known as Boykin - prevailed. They not only survived, but created quilts that are now renowned as modern works of abstract art.

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Watch: The quilters of Gee's Bend sewed masterpieces out of old rags

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These black women from rural Alabama created celebrated folk art For many years, the only way to get to Gee's Bend, Alabama was by ferry. The isolated black hamlet survived slavery, share-cropping, the Great Depression, and floods. In the Civil Rights era, a vindictive sheriff cut off even the ferry service.

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The Remarkable Story of Gee's Bend Quilts

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The Remarkable Story of Gee's Bend Quilts

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The Remarkable Story of Gee's Bend Quilts | Widewalls

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Gee's Bend is an Alabama community saluted for the outstanding quilt production, made by women to claim their African identity and articulate racism.

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Quilting from the Deep South: a lesson in creativity your way

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Quilting from the Deep South: a lesson in creativity your way

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Rooted in folk traditions, quilts from the Alabama hamlet of Gee's Bend have long been prized by museums in the States. Now, their unbounded creativity has arrived in the UK.

From the Spring 2020 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA. Ellen Mara De Wachter is a writer based in London and the author of Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration (Phaidon).

The quilters of Gee's Bend, an isolated hamlet situated on a bend in the Alabama River, have a term for designs that break with tradition: they are done "my way". Like the best jazz, "my way" quilts are guided by a combination of skill, practice and improvisation. For the past century, women such as Annie Mae Young, Loretta Pettway and Mary Lee Bendolph have stitched together fabric in different shapes, sizes and colours, and by gloriously deviating from prescribed patterns or colour schemes they have exercised an unbounded artistic freedom.

Although quilting in Gee's Bend dates back to the late 19th century, the practice gathered momentum during the Civil Rights movement with the Freedom Quilting Bee, a co-operative set up in 1966 across Alabama's Black Belt to enable women to sell their work at auction and through department stores, including Bloomingdales and Sears. Then later, in 1998, the folk art collector William Arnett saw a photograph by Roland Freeman depicting Annie Mae Young alongside some of her quilts that were draped over a woodpile. He visited Gee's Bend and purchased hundreds of quilts, many of which have since been shown in museums across the US. This year, for the first time in the UK, they were shown as part of the Turner Contemporary show, We Will Walk - Art and Resistance in the American South.

Many of the current citizens of Gee's Bend (whose official name is Boykin) are descended from black people who were enslaved by the Pettway cotton plantation, and who remained in the area after Emancipation in 1863, working the land as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. The community survived through the economic hardships of the 1930s, and in the 1940s families were able to purchase their farms from the government at subsidised prices. These events, along with the Bend's geographic isolation, produced a tight-knit society with an especially fertile quilting culture whose distinctive aesthetic is the result of experimentation and a predilection for minimalism. These eminently modern values set apart the work of the quilters of Gee's Bend from more conventional approaches to quilting that were popular across America's rural states.

As a means to salvage scraps of cloth, transform worn out garments into decorative bedding, and socialise over shared work, quilting is a deeply pragmatic art. Its ethical qualities resonate with contemporary concerns around reuse and recycling, artisanal production and collaboration. Yet this humble art can generate sublime results. In creating "my way" quilts, individuals honour and transform foundational motifs common across America, such as Housetop, or Bricklayer designs, into persuasive declarations of individuality. Anyone who harbours a creative project they dare not initiate can draw inspiration from Pearlie Pettway Hall's 1950s medallion quilt, which is built around two central blocks - one brown, one white. Its simplicity and grace rivals that of the most distinguished minimalist paintings. In Annie Mae Young's Bars (c. 1965), which uses a range of fabrics, including corduroy and denim, individual oblongs correspond to trouser legs, while black swatches are alternated with colours to create a visual sense of rhythm. These simple mimetic compositions, rendered with a confidence that is both refreshing and reassuring, convey the importance of stable foundations for individuality and community.
We Will Walk: Art and Resistance in the American South opened at Turner Contemporary, Margate, in February 2020, but is currently closed due to COVID-19.

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Quilting from the Deep South: a lesson in creativity your way | Blog | Royal Academy of Arts

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Rooted in folk traditions, quilts from the Alabama hamlet of Gee's Bend have long been prized by museums in the States. Now, their unbounded creativity has arrived in the UK. From the Spring 2020 issue of RA Magazine , issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.

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The Freedom Quilting Bee:Textile Art and Mutual Aidin the Civil Rights South

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The Freedom Quilting Bee:Textile Art and Mutual Aidin the Civil Rights South

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Community leader and civil rights activist Estelle Witherspoon (1916-2001) served as the first manager of the Freedom Quilting Bee, and her home served as the initial base for the group. Photograph by Nancy Callahan

In Wilcox County, at the rural center of Alabama, a remarkable convergence of political, economic and artistic innovations gave rise to a new vision of self-determination and social transformation that would forever change the lives of the communities that lived there.

In 1965 the national Civil RIghts movement had become focused on the Black Belt, a place named both for its rich fertile soil, and because it was home to many African American share-croppers who lived and worked in extreme poverty. Amidst an atmosphere charged by racist murders and police violence which would prompt President Johnson's legislation protecting voting rights, the black community and their allies responded with counter-demonstrations and perhaps most memorably, a four day march from Selma to Montgomery led by Martin Luther King Jr. Black residents experienced targeted economic repression by landlords, business owners and banks, finding themselves suddenly evicted or required to pay back loans or store credit in full as a direct result of their participation in these demonstrations for voting rights, as was often communicated to them directly. These events, and the increasingly dire conditions that led to them, contributed to this region being the focus of daily news headlines across the country over the spring and summer of that year. It is from within this crisis that an incredible group of talented black women artists came together and built a network across the country that enabled a thriving community project in Wilcox County, Alabama, known as the Freedom Quilting Bee (FQB).

Estelle Witherspoon, 1980 Photo by John Reese

Quilting had always been a form of creative expression, resourcefulness, care and beauty in African American communities. Quilts were made by piecing together scraps, cast-off old clothes and waste products from textile factory work, then lovingly and fastidiously hand pieced and often collectively quilted in what's known as a "Bee". Before the community had a purpose-built space, they would gather together in each other's homes to collectivize the labor of completing a quilt, which was practical and also served as a celebration. In homes such as that of civil rights activist and future FQB leader Estelle Witherspoon, the women from this and neighboring communities created their own distinct styles and innovative interpretations of classic designs. Gee's Bend, a now well-known community of visionary quilters, isolated within a large bend of the Alabama River, was a short car and ferry ride from the Freedom Quilting Bee, and many of its members came from the FQB to participate in the project. Before it was established, the FQB women made quilts for their families and friends, and if for some reason they were able to find buyers, they got $5 for a quilt (equal to about $40 today) which would have required weeks of labor. Things would change for these artists as the confluence of events and civil rights activism that was occuring in the area brought not only media attention but also newcomers showing up looking to be of help. This in part made it possible for new connections to be forged in the midst of so much upheaval which allowed for radical new possibilities for the lives of these women and their families.

While the Freedom Quilting Bee cooperative was first and foremost the result of the women who created the beautiful quilts and worked to build and run the organization, it may not have happened without a number of people and groups who contributed time, social connections, services, materials, and other resources to the project. The Selma Inter-Religious Project (SIP) and the Selma Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were central to the local civil-rights organizing at the time and much of the initial resources for buying the quilts came from their extended networks. One of the people who helped the FQB to grow was Father Walter, a white Episcopalian Minister who was denied work, loans and even the right to adopt children in Alabama for years because of the interference of a Bishop who took issue with his anti-racist interpretation of the gospel. It was Father Walter, who, while working for the civil rights movement, arranged to have the quilts auctioned at a hip photography studio in New York City and helped establish the initial connections with the art scene there, eventually leading to the promotion of the quilters and their work by abstract expressionist painter Lee Krasner, art historian and curator of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art Henry Geldzahler, interior designer Sister Parish, and long-time Vogue editor Diana Vreeland.

"Quilter's Fancy" by Estelle Witherspoon n/d. Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio

As the story goes, Father Walter was driving around Possum Bend with another civil-right activist working in Wilcox County when he saw 3 beautiful quilts hanging out on a line. Perhaps because of the influence of his wife who was a graduate student in art, or maybe owing to his time in Seminary school in NYC, he recognized that there was something about these quilts - the high-contrast graphic designs, the flare of color and style - that reminded him of the art world beyond rural Alabama. He and his friend got out of the car, hoping to speak to the artist who had made them but it seemed no one was home. Returning later with a local black woman, Ms. Saulsbury, who knew the quilter, Ora McDaniels, he realized that when she had seen two white men coming to her house, she had run into the woods to hide. The second encounter was smoothed by the presence of a mutual acquaintance and he bought a few quilts from her and a number of other women in Possum Bend. He bought them outright for $10 each and the sale of a ten-dollar quilt meant for most a 1% gain in annual income. He explained that he was going to have them sold at an auction in New York and would bring back whatever profits were made on top of the $10. As SLSC representative Reverend Dan Harrell recounted in Nancy Callahan's book The Freedom Quilting Bee:

The people were in a win-win situation. Ten dollars was twice as much as they'd ever got for a quilt before. So if this crazy white man ever showed up again, it didn't really matter. But my goodness if he actually was going to do what he said, rather unheard of for white people, that would be even better. What was there to lose? ¹

When Father Walter returned with profits from the auction, as promised, it turned out they had everything to gain. As more and more women offered up quilts, some made to order, some pulled out of storage chests and directly off of beds, it became obvious to the community that this was a cooperative ready to blossom. They obtained free services from a lawyer, and on March 26, 1966, within one year of Martin Luther King Jr's famous march across the Black Belt, 60 quilters came together to adopt a charter, elect officers and establish this organization that would change Wilcox county and the lives of so many of the people who lived there.

Groundbreaking at FQB site in March 1969

All-wool crazy quilt made for the Freedom Quilting Bee by Minsie Lee Pettway. Photograph by Nancy Callahan

The Freedom Quilting Bee: Folk Art and the Civil Rights Movement by Nancy Callahan

What began as an informal group of quilters with unlikely connections to well-positioned people led to a robust workers-cooperative which enabled the women to buy land, build a large sewing studio with a built-in daycare center, and sell small parcels of the land to provide housing to members of their community who had been displaced in the fight for voting rights. The Civil Rights movement brought an unexpected influx of resources and media attention to a poor rural African American community. Understanding that this moment might never come again, the women of this community, aided by those people who were determined to offer what support they could, tenaciously seized their opportunity and established a means for their community to mutually flourish.

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Community leader and civil rights activist Estelle Witherspoon (1916-2001) served as the first manager of the Freedom Quilting Bee, and her home served as the initial base for the group.

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Learning to Patchwork in Gee’s Bend, Alabama

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Learning to Patchwork in Gee’s Bend, Alabama

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Below, we share an extract from Victoria Finlay's latest book, Fabric, as she details learning to patchwork in Gee's Bend, Alabama and reflects on memories of her mother. The area, just southwest of Selma in Alabama, is famous for its quilts; the tradition there traces back to the 19th century, passed from generation to generation. Integral to the history of African American art, the improvisational patchworks are now held in many museums across the country.
I learned how to make a real patchwork at Gee's Bend, Alabama, a place named after a 19th century slave owner and a loop in the Alabama River so deep that it's like three sides of a square. The settlement was bizarrely renamed Boykin in the 1940s, after a white congressman, now remembered for his adultery, alleged bribery, and his opposition to the Civil Rights Act. But most people today still call it Gee's Bend, and it's famous for its astonishing quilts.

I turn up at Gee's Bend, hoping to learn how to make them, though my emails and real letters don't seem to have arrived, and I haven't got through on a phone.

I know I'm heading in the right direction because I see big wooden banner boards at intervals along the road, printed with images of some of the patchworks that made this place famous. They're all around: it feels like a pilgrim trail. I'm not sure where I'm going, but the person I ask jumps in her car to lead the way and I follow to a weatherboard community hall with "Gee's Bend Quilters" on a sign by the door. There's a small shop to one side and a main room with two quilting frames and several sewing machines and piles of fabric everywhere, on tables and spilling out of dustbin bags on the floor. Two women are there working side by side. One is the manager of the Gee's Bend Quilting Collective, Mary Ann Pettway. She says she doesn't give lessons but we can talk, so we sit down. I tell her how my book started with a plan to make a patchwork to get over my father's death, but then my mother died first and I still don't know how to make one.

"I'll teach you the nine-patch," Mary Ann says, suddenly. "My mama taught it to me when I was six or seven, and I'll teach it to you ... I never do this usually," she says. "But I'm sorry about your mother and not knowing."

The way she learned is by watching so that's how she will teach me. She starts by cutting nine squares, five of one colour, four of another - "don't worry if they're even" - then sews them by machine into three lines of three, irons them (only on the back so that the front doesn't get shiny) then joins them into nine.

I sew the first three sets of three squares together. I haven't used a sewing machine for a while. Before I iron, I open out the fabric and, without thinking, press the seams open. Mary Ann stops me.

"Never open out the seams. It makes them weak," she says, folding them back. This does mean that, as the patterns get bigger, I'll have to make sure a seam folded in one direction doesn't find itself needing to fold in another direction later - which sounds implausible but is something I'll find myself doing over and over. "It's just practice," Mary Ann will say. "You can always undo." I become good at undoing. There's no pattern or template to cut around; everything's done by eye; the playful thing is to make it a bit accurate but not too much, and then to subvert it just enough.

Once I've done a few nine-patch squares, she shows me how to sew a panel on the top and another on the bottom in one of the two colours. For this she uses a grid, to get the corners right-angled. "Within a block doesn't matter, but if you want to make it easy for yourself, then make sure the edges fit."

There's a TV at the end of the room. When visitors are expected, which is often, it plays an hour-long documentary on a loop. The audio track of the story it tells, over and over, becomes the backdrop to my days at Gee's Bend.

. . .

In 1992, a photographer arrived. Roland Freeman had worked for magazine and the Magnum photo agency. Then in his fifties, he was documenting African American quilts from all around the South for a book that would be the first large-scale survey of the subject by an African American. In Gee's Bend, he interviewed Annie Mae Young and took a picture of her and her little great-granddaughter Shaquetta, standing outside her house with two quilts thrown over a woodpile behind them. Six years later, a white collector of African American art, William Arnett, was arrested by that photograph.

The main quilt had a wide frame of worn blue denim strips, and the centre was two big squares next to each other. One had yellow and red stripes; the other brown and red stripes, almost as if it were the first one in shadow. The result was vibrant and unexpected, and reminded Arnett of abstract impressionist art. Arnett obtained an introduction to Young and drove to Gee's Bend. He asked what other quilters there were in the area, and eventually made contact with more than 150, documenting 700 quilts dating from the 1920s to the 1990s. Soon, there were exhibitions being held in several major US museums; in 2006, the US Post Office produced a series of ten stamps with images of the quilts; the discovery of Gee's Bend patchworks was hailed as one of the greatest finds of 'undocumented' art in America.

Mary Ann told me how she spent most of her working life making uniforms at a sewing factory near Selma. Between a mortgage to pay and looking after her children, she didn't have time for quilts. But she had a friend whose grandmother, Arlonzia Pettway (no relation to Mary Ann), was a star quilter. She used to talk about the trips they all went on, the museum openings, the workshops they gave, and one day Mary Ann joked that she was tired of hearing about these good times: she wanted to start having a good time too.

"So get quilting," Arlonzia said.

And she watched for a bit what Arlonzia did, and recalled her childhood sewing with her mother, and then she got quilting.

In Gee's Bend, the quilting lines are less important than the patches. But when you flip your attention away from the bright squares and blocks and focus on the stitches holding them in place, there are curves and broken patterns like the skeletal structures of a leaf, and they have a beauty too, if you stop to look. Unlike in Welsh quilts there are no templates or guidelines. This is all by eye. I do it wrong and sew my first lines very close together. I have a choice: I can set myself up for a very long piece of work ahead, or I can just accept (as I do) that it's a practice piece, and then do the rest with wider spacing.

There are no machine sounds except a radio in the background. Mary Ann's tuned in to a gospel station. Often they start a quilting session with a gospel hymn and a prayer, she says. There are two other quilters from Gee's Bend this morning, one sewing, one sitting drinking coffee. Sometimes we chat - about politics or our mothers or about funny things that happened when they went to a quilting show. But usually we lapse into silence.
The Hidden History of the Material World Image one: A patchwork sampler, Victoria Finlay Image two: The Gee's Bend community hall, Victoria Finlay Image three: Mary Ann Pettway quilting, Victoria Finlay Image four: Quilt design on a billboard, USA, Victoria Finlay by Victoria Finlay, published by Profile Books, £25.
This is what my mother and I hoped to find when we planned to make the worst patchwork in the world. Calmness. Laughter. A sense of community. Strength. I learned from my mother that when something bad happens, I should think of how I might raise a glass to it in the future. It doesn't mean the thing was good, just that if I can find something good in the end, then we haven't lost. Life hasn't lost.

If my mother hadn't died, I wouldn't be here, learning to quilt from someone who's at peace with what has happened in her life, and who has opened her skill and her home and her kindness to me. And I look up to the right, as I do when I want to find my mother, and I smile, and I mouth: "Thank you".

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Learning to Patchwork in Gee's Bend, Alabama

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Below, we share an extract from Victoria Finlay's latest book, Fabric , as she details learning to patchwork in Gee's Bend, Alabama and reflects on memories of her mother. The area, just southwest of Selma in Alabama, is famous for its quilts; the tradition there traces back to the 19th century, passed from generation to generation.

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Celebrating Women’s History Month: The Gee’s Bend Quilters and Copyright

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Celebrating Women’s History Month: The Gee’s Bend Quilters and Copyright

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Celebrating Women’s History Month: The Gee’s Bend Quilters and Copyright | Copyright: Creativity at Work

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The Gee’s Bend quilters have a rich creative history. Through educational outreach from various organizations, the women of Gee’s Bend have learned about copyright and their intellectual property rights.

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By Anthea Gerrie | Photography courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery

They pieced together their quilts from scraps to keep their families warm and sold a few to put food on the table when cotton prices tumbled and left them destitute. Although they held "airing out" days when they hung up and admired each other's work, they never thought of themselves as artists. Nevertheless, the stitchers of Gee's Bend, Alabama, were rediscovered by a canny collector, praised to the skies by Jane Fonda, embraced by museum curators, and described in the New York Times as "the equals of Klee and Matisse."

"Their creative urge to dream up designs while working in the fields and then go home and make something beautiful to take their minds off their hardship was amazing," says writer Susan Goldman Rubin, who felt "haunted" by the quilts after seeing them at the Whitney Museum of American Art in a show that drew shining accolades from across the nation. "Their unusual and innovative colors and patterns were thrilling, full of freedom," says the writer, whose book The Quilts of Gee's Bend vividly tells the story of these women and their art.

Now the work that has put the remote hamlet also known as Boykin on the map and secured a place in America's most prestigious museums has reached London, where their first show in Europe was a near sell-out. Most of the thirteen quilts on display were acquired by European institutions keen to emulate MoMA, the Met, and other prestigious museums throughout the US that already have Gee's Bend hangings in their collections.

This is a literal rags-to-riches story-the quilts were made by dirt-poor women, nearly all named Pettway for the owner of the plantation home of their slave ancestors; yet their works now command five-figure sums. The trickle-down effect has stopped short of making them rich, but fame has transformed the lives of many with basic necessities like indoor bathrooms and appliances. "Things have changed. I have gas; I have water; I have lights, a washing machine, a refrigerator, and a deep freezer," says seventy-eight-year-old Loretta Pettway, one of the most legendary quilters, even though she admits, "I didn't like to sew." Only the need to keep her children warm changed the mind of the mother of seven who trudged so many miles a day in the cotton fields. As a child laborer, she came home too tired to join the family quilting effort.

The women of Gee's Bend first attracted attention in the 1960s, when a Civil Rights-funded outfit, the Freedom Quilting Bee, was set up to supply Sears and Bloomingdale's with Southern folk art. But the stitchers of Gee's Bend, whose creativity attracted early collectors like Lee Krasner, the artist wife of Jackson Pollock, were ill suited to the task of neatly copying quilts designed by others from pattern books. Annie Mae Young, whose work first attracted the attention of the collector who put Gee's Bend on the twenty-first-century world art map, was rejected for the unevenness of her stitches, and the women gradually returned to expressing their original visions.

One man who had heard of the Gee's Bend women was Martin Luther King, Jr., who stopped there on his way to Selma in 1965 and told them, "I came over here to tell you, you are somebody." But as ninety-year-old Nettie Young reflected forty years later, "Martin Luther King got us out of the cotton patch; the Arnetts got us out from under the bedsprings and onto the museum walls."

She was referring to Bill Arnett, who brought the quilters to national prominence with the help of his son Matt, Jane Fonda's one-time son-in-law. Arnett Sr. was an aficionado of African American art who went to Alabama in search of Annie Mae, inspired by a quilt he had seen in an art book. Surprised-she was unaware her work had been publicized-she dug it out, sold it to him, and sent him on to other Gee's Bend stitchers. Arnett would meet 150 quilters by the time he brought their work to the attention of the Houston curator who predicted they would find a permanent place in American art history.

With baby steps, she started collecting scraps of her family's worn-out clothes to make striking abstracts, like her denim work clothes quilt, replete with patch pockets, now hanging in London.

Sure enough, the 2002 show mounted by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, went on to be a sensation in twelve American cities, including Milwaukee, where the artists were greeted at the museum by Jane Fonda. The actress pronounced their work "full of love and patriotism and hope" in her speech introducing the stitchers to the city's culture crowd.

Unlike traditional slave quilts, which often told a story or contained secret maps to indicate escape routes to freedom, the Gee's Bend work reflects the modern lives of their makers. "Housetop" squares are inspired by the rafters they look up to from their beds. Other squares come from "work clothes," a genre poignantly espoused by Missouri Pettway, who ripped shreds from her late husband's clothes to make a quilt "to remember him and cover up under it for love." Some of the women would sit under a tree and wait for inspiration; others said designs, which include dazzling displays of starbursts and diamonds, came to them in dreams.

The London show runs through February 6, 2021, at the Alison Jacques Gallery. It spans ninety years of craft, with highlights including a two-sided quilt made by fourth-generation quilter Essie Bendolph Pettway when she was twelve; Loretta Pettway's Log Cabin , whose brightly colored strips recall the Ocean Park abstracts of Richard Diebenkorn; and the dazzling , an array of colorful squares stitched by Rita Mae Pettway in 2019. This dazzlingly modern work belies the fact the artist was seventy-eight when she made it. It is shown alongside the quilt made by her grandmother, Annie E. Pettway, in 1930, the oldest work in the show. Pig in the Pen

At sixty years old, Loretta Pettway Bennett is the youngest of the exhibited artists. She confesses that her first quilt, started when she was thirteen or fourteen, was "lopsided and my mom finished it." Removed from the community when she moved to Germany with her soldier husband, she was reintroduced to the pleasures of stitching alongside her mother, aunt, and grandmother when she moved back to Gee's Bend while her husband was in officer candidate school. She had no aspirations to fame when she applied for a grant from the Alabama State Council on the Arts in 2001 to study the art of quilting from her mother; she merely had a desire to keep the tradition going when she saw it becoming a dying art. But the Houston art show one year later made her wonder, "Can I make a quilt that someday might hang on the wall of a museum?" With baby steps, she started collecting scraps of her family's worn-out clothes to make striking abstracts, like her denim work clothes quilt, replete with patch pockets, now hanging in London.

Despite the fact that prices of up to $50,000 per quilt have been achieved in the new show, the Gee's Bend community as a whole remains impoverished, according to Mary Margaret Pettway of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. The organization was founded by Bill Arnett to research, preserve, and exhibit African American art. Mary Margaret, who once slept under quilts made by her mother, Lucy-which now hang in the Met and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston-reflects sadly, "The traditions that have earned my community such acclaim have not resulted in economic advancement for the majority of quilters and their families. The average annual income here is under $10,000, and well over half the residents live in poverty."

The foundation has mounted a fund-raising drive to train Gee's Bend quilters how to market, brand, and sell their products and provide internet access for online trading. Some have already acquired the confidence to deal with galleries. "For our show, we worked directly with some of the artists as well as the foundation to source the quilts we exhibited," says Hannah Robinson of the Alison Jacques Gallery in London.

Only in later life have the youngest artists, like Rita Mae's daughter Louisiana Pettway Bendolph-who expanded into fine art prints exhibited alongside Andy Warhol's at MOCA Jacksonville-come to recognize work born in hard times as a means of joyful creative expression. Hating stitching at age twelve, the fourth-generation quilter was called back to the art in middle age by the critical acclaim that made her realize she had inherited a very special talent. Now sixty, she says, "To me, I'm still just plain and simple Lou. I need to get used to 'Louisiana Bendolph, the artist.' But I'm proud of that. I really am."
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Visit AlisonJacquesGallery.com to learn more about the exhibition. The Quilts of Gee's Bend by Susan Goldman Rubin is published by Abrams. Readers can also support Souls Grown Deep's fund-raising drive at DonorBox.org/support-gee-s-bend-quilters .

Anthea Gerrie is based in the UK but travels the world in search of stories. Her special interests are architecture and design, culture, food, and drink, as well as the best places to visit in the world's great playgrounds. She is a regular contributor to the Daily Mail Independent Blueprint

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They pieced together their quilts from scraps to keep their families warm and sold a few to put food on the table when cotton prices tumbled and left them destitute. Although they held "airing out" days when they hung up and admired each other's work, they never thought of themselves as artists.

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Black History Month and Gee's Bend Quilters

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Black History Month and Gee's Bend Quilters

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I just discovered an awesome web site with some great background and bio info on these amazing quilters from Gee's Bend. I've shared my adaptations of 8 of the quilts here before. The fantastic thing about this site is that there are a lot of quilt pictures and quilts attributed to the various quilters.

The site is called The Gee's Bend Quiltmakers.

Just to get something straight (because I've had some snarly comments about my right to pattern the quilts): Windham Fabrics went to great lengths and a year of negotiations to partner with the Gee's Bend Collective in order to create a set of solid/batik fabrics (about 2 dozen colors) AND got permission for me to pattern 8 of the quilts that THEY AGREED TO. The Gee's Bend quilters own the rights to the original quilts. They were improvisational. I own the rights to the adaptations, the patterns that were created. The Gee's Bend Collective received royalties from the sale of the kits (fabrics plus patterns) for several years. All rights to the patterns belong to me. That's how I can continue to sell them. I am stepping on no one's toes!

Now, back to this awesome web site. Since it's Black History month, getting some solid background info on these talented ladies is a good place to start. It lists each quilter and links to many (maybe all) of the quilts she has made. You will spend a LOT of time here, I promise, so go get another cup of coffee.

NOTE: When you click on the name of the quilt maker, it will take you to a page dedicated to her and the various quilts she has made. It's an awesome thing to see, believe me!

Also, the 8 quilts I share here are the quilts I have patterned and are available at my Etsy shop.

Mary Lee Bendolph gave her permission for me to pattern Strips and Strings. Holy cow! That was the hardest quilt. Why? Just look! How can you pattern something so, well, improvisational!

And here's my rendition. Pretty close, huh?
Mary Lee Bennett also made one of the Housetop quilts - Housetop 4 Block:

This was easier to pattern. What do you think?

My Housetop 4 Block is available at my Etsy shop. You can see a bio page on Mary L. Bennett there, too.

Bennett is a popular last name. Loretta P. Bennett made Blocks and Strips, which was the easiest to pattern of the 8 quilts. Here is hers:

And here is mine (with pattern available in my Etsy shop):

Loretta Pettway Bennett created the Work Clothes Denim Quilt. This is a fun way to recycle old jeans. And let's make sure we include a few pockets here!

And my version. Yes, four pockets!

Qunnie Pettway designed and made Lazy Gal. Don't you just love that quilt name?

This was also an easier quilt to pattern. No hair pulling here. My version of Lazy Gal.

Rita Mae Pettway made Housetop Denim. There were a LOT of "housetop" quilts (ie, log cabin variations). And they used a lot of denim - leftover jeans.

My version is scaled at 3/4 (as we did with most of the others). Don't you love that renegade piece of red print up at the top?

Louisiana P. Bendolf created this fantastic strippy quilt she called Medallion Variation. This was also a hair puller to pattern. Look at all those strips and strings! And, yes, that is a LOT of white around the center!

Windham asked me to pattern just the center. Again, this was a real challenge, but I gave it my best shot. I actually made Medallion Variation two times. I gave the second one to my oldest daughter's best friend and she was delighted beyond words!

Here is Meg and me with her special birthday gift a few years ago. I hung it in my kitchen with a big sign at the top: Happy Birthday, Meg. It took her about 20 minutes to finally look up and see that it was hers!

And the last quilt in this series is Housetop 9 Block by Annie E. Pettway.

My version:

I hope you enjoyed seeing all of these amazing quilts. Perhaps you've been to an exhibit of Gee's Bend quilt or had the privilege to attend one of these quilters' workshops or lectures.

I hope you also take some time to visit the links I've shared above: The Gee's Bend Quilters. There are so many quilts made by so many Gee's Bend quilters. I personally have never seen so many in one place (and I've been at this for over 10 years).

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Black History Month and Gee's Bend Quilters

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I just discovered an awesome web site with some great background and bio info on these amazing quilters from Gee's Bend. I've shared my adaptations of 8 of the quilts here before. The fantastic thing about this site is that there are a lot of quilt pictures and quilts attributed to the various quilters.

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Anatomy of a quilt: The Gees. Bend Freedom Quilting Bee

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Anatomy of a quilt: The Gees. Bend Freedom Quilting Bee

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The Alabama women who made quilts modern art

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The Alabama women who made quilts modern art

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The Alabama Women Who Made Their Quilts a Part of Modern Art | Artsy

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Quilts are the artistic treasures of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. There, generations of women have been stitching these striking textiles for over a century.

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The New Bend Contemporary weaving artist Diedrick Brackens reinterprets a centuries-old quilting tradition

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The New Bend Contemporary weaving artist Diedrick Brackens reinterprets a centuries-old quilting tradition

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nd yet psychologically, I haven't left the South, and neither has Brackens, which is evident in his art (though the Mexia, Texas-born thirty-three-year-old artist now makes his physical home in Los Angeles). In an interview in Gulf Coast, a literary journal published out of the University of Houston, he says, "I think often about the unknowable terrors and violence endured, all back-dropped by King Cotton. And I know it is my life's work to try and make something beautiful out of this material. I hope it is some small healing tribute to my ancestors when I choose to sit at my loom and weave my stories."

Quiltmaking, the tradition in which Brackens's tapestry sits, asks for every part of its maker, every piece of what you have-the remnants of a pair of jeans, the skirt of a dress (that itself once came from a sack of feed). It doesn't question, so long as you have faith in your two good hands to transform it.

The star pattern at the center of survival is a shrine... is often known by the name it was standardized as, the Sawtooth Star, which is from an 1884 pattern in Farm & Fireside magazine. It has also been known as the North Star, emblematic of the celestial figure of freedom for Black folks fleeing enslavement in the South. Like me, Diedrick Brackens is a Black queer person from Texas. You can read the figure's position inside the North Star two ways: being framed by history, an acknowledgement of the longstanding place of queer creators within this Black artistic tradition, as well as bursting out from within it, unable to be contained by the structures it imposes.

The docent (I'm too awkward to ask his name, given that we've already waded into conversation) asks me what drew me to Brackens's piece, and I tell him that I'm here to write an article, I'm a journalist. But the truth is more complicated than that. I'm here to see if the art can make some sense of me, some sense of this vision I had. The existence of a quilt implies a recipient-someone to sleep beneath it, to make it into a pallet. What did this quilt, rendered by Black queer hands that knew of the impossibility I felt back in Texas, have to teach me?

I see this feeling of impossibility portrayed in Brackens's work. Or rather, a presence that insists on being felt in spite of the way it's been made to feel impossible. The opacity of the central figure shelters their most intimate parts away from the unkind gaze, one who would seek to cast the figure as a sinner, as a criminal. (I am intentional here in my choice of the pronoun they, in recognition of the unknowability of the figure's gender, information that I as a viewer am not privy to.) From up close, you can see the figure's soft and malleable texture, rendered in black acrylic yarn on top of a base layer of hand-dyed blue cotton. The heaviness of the acrylic's texture lends heft to the silhouette.

Brackens is often placed in conversation with Kara Walker, whose life-size black cut-paper silhouettes often feel to me like the embodiment Zora Neale Hurston spoke of when she said, "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background," that is to say historicized and stuck. The seemingly supple yet fundamentally opaque texture of Brackens's yarn, on the other hand, feels like a deliberate rewriting of the background the figure is placed upon, a queering of the tradition, in a sense. The figures that Brackens depicts say first and foremost that there is no story of the South that can be told without queer Black people. Yet and still, the casual viewer in this New York gallery is not allowed to penetrate their interiority.

The figure squats in the center of the North Star, raised on the balls of their feet, almost like they're giving birth. Though being rendered in the tapestry requires confinement, the stillness is an unstable stasis. Their arms extend past the borders of the quilt's central square, at once shrinking into the square and breaking out of it. I am reminded that in the absence of community, which many queer Southerners find themselves without, coming into your identity can feel like giving birth to yourself. Sloughing off the afterbirth of tradition, of homophobia, and beginning a new life from the DNA of the old. It's a lot like quilting in this way, too-the scraps of the old life giving rise to something new, something that can keep you warm.

When I see it up close, I'm struck in particular by how the panels cut through the figure's arms and thighs where they are pieced together. There is a price, it seems to say, to being a part of this tradition as a queer Black person. Though you will emerge from it, there will be scars.

The docent and I keep talking about the rest of the exhibition: eleven other pieces that range from durags affixed to a wooden panel to figurative quilted textiles that look like they're out of a Faith Ringgold painting. The careful eye for geometry the artists of Gee's Bend are known for suffuses many of the pieces in the exhibition. In others, the tradition of bold and seemingly improvisational use of color comes through. We chat about our favorite pieces, things that surprised us. I didn't know things like this could be art before this, he says. I get it. There's something funny about quilting, something Black folks did for each other, the thing we did to keep warm, hanging in a gallery frequented by bougie people in the know.

ou have to go three generations back on my mom's side to get to the quilters. With my grandmother's generation, we became writers thanks to the blessings of natural inclination and circumstance. I never knew my great-grandmother, though I am named for her. I grew up with her quilts in my house. They were tattered from good use by the time they got to me-I imagine them on the floor of her house in Nichburg, Alabama, when my mom would stay in the summers, or keeping the family warm in the rare winter that southern Alabama got snow. Hanging on the line, beaten with a broom to get the dust out. They're tucked away nowadays, since my mom treats them as art-we get our blankets for snuggling at Ross. But I can still call them in my mind's eye, their vibrant greens and reds. I liked their color-blocked tatters; they were soft.

When I was eighteen, my adopted godmother gave me a quilt, a combination baptism and high school graduation gift. I attended church throughout my adolescence, singing in the choirs and performing in the Christmas and Easter pageants every year. It was a conscious decision on my mother's part to take me there, even if it wasn't always as progressive as she might have liked otherwise. She knew she was raising a Black child of mixed heritage in a predominantly white neighborhood who was going to predominantly white schools, so she wanted me to start every week with my feet firmly planted amongst Black people, in a sense of community in Houston's Third Ward.

I still think it's funny that I chose to get baptized in a church that explicitly told me during my confirmation that being gay was a sin. I can't really explain it. I wanted to be immersed. I wanted to see God, even if I knew that some of the people in that church couldn't see me in my entirety. But perhaps even more than that, I wanted to leave home knowing I carried something within my soul of that place that always supported me in the ways it knew how, keeping close the memories of selling Girl Scout cookies in the church lobby, of playing Beneatha in the Black history month performance of A Raisin in the Sun. Rather than the traditional soft cotton squares I grew up with, the quilt my godmother gave me was a Frida Kahlo-inspired quilt, dotted with calaveras and unibrowed caricatures, somewhat coarse in its newness. There's no batting in it yet, so it's decorative more than anything else, but it followed me to the Northeast for college, to the land I ran to in order to find myself, and in finding myself, find others like me.

Though Brackens's tapestry bears the patchwork tradition of the quilts I grew up with, there's something deeply grounding about seeing the silhouetted figure emblazoned upon it-it tells me that we belong, if not to the South, then to one another. We make a home of each other where we are. My eyes linger over the tapestry's bottom edge, where an array of tassels of blue and black yarn hems the bottom left and right panels. But the middle-bottom panel is left sans tassels. The longer I look, I realize that the figure is not evenly centered in the middle panel-they're on the edge, almost as if they're about to take a step down into the blue beneath, to free themselves from the structure of societal tradition, to swim into the deep in search of more fertile shores.

It's easy to forget that Manhattan is an island. In fact the city often feels designed to make you forget the delicate balance it strikes with the water. After I leave the gallery, I remember I'm just a block away from the Hudson. As a child of the Gulf Coast, water always reminds me of home, both its pleasures and its seemingly vengeful vagaries. As I walk along the banks, I think about the life I've made for myself here, amongst Black queer people, always writing about home yet still not daring to return.

From this bend in the river, that figure I dreamed of, that body enshrined in the quilt from a place it left behind, finally begins to make sense. The quilt is as much me as the body it covers is. There are parts of me that are still in pieces, even as much as I'd like to pretend that I left that fractured self behind. Walking along the Hudson, I drape myself in the quilt of the wounds I've inherited, of the violences that climate change will go on to inflict. I shield myself from the cold, even when it reminds me of a warmth I cannot return to. And I sit at the new bend of the river, writing about the future that awaits.

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nd yet psychologically, I haven't left the South, and neither has Brackens, which is evident in his art (though the Mexia, Texas-born thirty-three-year-old artist now makes his physical home in Los Angeles). In an interview in Gulf Coast, a literary journal published out of the University of Houston, he says, "I think often about the unknowable terrors and violence endured, all back-dropped by King Cotton.

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Gee's Bend Quilters & Joe Cunningham, INDUSTRY episode

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Gee's Bend Quilters & Joe Cunningham, INDUSTRY episode

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Gee's Bend Quilters & Joe Cunningham, INDUSTRY episode

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"Traditional and Modern: Quilts of Gee's Bend" presented by Allyson Allen

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"Traditional and Modern: Quilts of Gee's Bend" presented by Allyson Allen

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"Traditional and Modern: Quilts of Gee's Bend" presented by Allyson Allen

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The Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers: A Modernist Art with Folk Traditions

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The Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers: A Modernist Art with Folk Traditions

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What is Gee's Bend?

In 1859 a woman named Dinah was torn from her home in Africa and taken to the United States, to be sold for a dime to a man named Pettway. Pettway would bring her to Gee's Bend, Alabama, where she and her fellow slaves on his plantation became known as their owner's property, and forced, as was the convention, to adopt his surname. Though not all Pettways of Gee's Bend are blood-related, the community is small - located on a rural and isolated bend in the Alabama River in the Black Belt of the southern United States. Gee's Bend comprises less than three hundred inhabitants, most of which are descendents of Pettway's slaves, with about half of all residents bearing the name or origin.

In the 1930's the community was struggling when the price of cotton dropped nearly overnight, and creditors came to collect. Gee's Bend was reduced to abject poverty, and as the nation's poorest community the government stepped in to provide housing and farm plots at affordable prices with low interest rates. The aid scheme allowed African American families the opportunity to own land for the first time, and contributed greatly to the demographic makeup of the town today.

Mary Lee Bendolph in front of one of her quilts in an exhibit at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.
(AP Photo / Chitose Suzuki)

Who are the Gee's Bend Quiltmakers?

Dinah's granddaughter, Arlonzia Pettway, began sewing quilts when she was 13 years old. She learned to sew from her mother, who had also inherited the methodology, and in so doing joined a long lineage of female quiltmakers that likely has origins beyond the 19th century. The group of women recognised today as the Gee's Bend Quiltmakers is composed of three to four generations of women that have created hundreds of quilts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Nearly all of the Gee's Bend women began quilting as children, and many have cited their primary motivation was to keep themselves and their children warm in the unheated homes in which they lived. From a purely cultural standpoint, the work of these women is exceptional for many reasons, among which is the social and geographic isolation in which the creations took place - providing an unprecedented degree of cultural continuity in a community in which the folk traditions were passed down from grandmother or mother to daughter.

The Artistry of Gee's Bend Quilts

From an artistic and aesthetic standpoint, the quilts embody several distinctive styles, outlined in the following different categories: abstract & improvisation; housetop & bricklayer; pattern & geometry; Sears corduroy; and work clothes.

Abstract & Improvisation Quilts

Most of Gee's Bend quilts can be characterised as abstract & improvisation quilts, or 'my way' quilts, in that they are guided by the desires and passions of their creator. Often unorthodox in their patterns, or with no pattern at all, these quilts reflect the whims of the women who made them - guided by a love of a particular colour or cloth.

Housetop or Bricklayer Quilts

Evocative of the African American musical tradition of call and response, housetop patterning is a favorite technique of the Gee's Bend quiltmaking group. The housetop, or bricklayer, quilt can be thought of as a guiding concept more than anything else, beginning with a piece of solid cloth, or one comprised of many components; to anchor the rest of the piece. Then rectangular strips of cloth join at one strip's long side ad the other's short, forming a framing around the central patch, adding more and more until the piece is deemed complete.

Geometric Quilts

The Gee's Bend quilts of the early 20th century are largely geometrically intricate pieces, comprised of many pieces of cloth in repeating patches of triangles, squares, diamonds, or hexagons. These works are testaments to the artistry that evolved from everyday life in the rural area - an outpouring of creation stemming from a necessary object - a blanket to keep a family warm.

Sears Corduroy Quilts

In the 1970s the Freedom Quilting Bee, a cooperative Civil Rights group based near Gee's Bend worked with retailer Sears & Roebuck to produce corduroy pillow cases. The fabric came in a few distinctive colours, that by way of scraps and reuse, began to find itself in the work of Gee's Bend quilts very quickly. The distinctive yellow, green, orange, and red corduroy spurred a creative outpouring which resulted in numerous corduroy quilts, a novel fabric at the time.

Workwear Quilts

Perhaps the most famous, and most unique, of Gee's Bend quilts are the workwear quilts. Born out of scarcity and poverty, workwear quilts are the result of years of hard times and the simple need to stay warm. These quilts are patchwork pieces borne from the resourcefulness of salvaging fabric scraps from worn out utilitarian clothing. The fabric, already having lived a hard life and no longer functional is repurposed from its residual pieces. These works are exceptional works of art in that they are both reflections of the spirit of the community and its prevailing socio-economic conditions of the moment. Until at least the mid-twentieth century the quilts of Gee's Bend were largely workwear quilts, reflective of the hardship the area experienced in the 1930s, and the former slave status of the residents. The fabrics of the workwear quilts; stained aprons, worn denim, and torn dresses are a tangible reflection of the lives marked by the hard labor of cotton picking in the fields of the Southern United States. These quilts, more so than any others, are perfectly preserved remnants of a past time; artworks undiluted by other cultures and unique to the isolation, remoteness and hardship that necessitated their creation.

The Renown of Gee's Bend Quilts

It was these qualities that lead art historian William (or Bill) Arnett, to Gee's Bend after seeing one of Annie Mae Young's quilts in a book. Determined to track down its creator Arnett found his way to Gee's Bend, where he ended up becoming inextricably linked to the quiltmakers themselves. After seemingly helping to catapult the women into the art world and an ensuing mainstream commercial success, Arnett could be construed as an archetypal and problematic "white saviour" figure, making efforts to set the women up with a foundation and organisational structure within which to sell their own products. However, he also ended up embroiled in a lawsuit filed by key quilters Annie Mae Young and Loretta Pettway, two of the most prominent figures in Gee's Bend, alleging that he had pocketed large sums from sales of their quilts. Several articles could be written on this controversy alone, but regardless of the financial implications behind his involvement, Arnett's influence led the quilts of Gee's Bend into museums around the world. With quilts hanging across the country in influential institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and numerous others; the work has been lauded as among the finest examples of American modernist art in existence.

The pieces have been described as surprisingly minimalist works, yet lyrical and jazzy with their wavy stitches overlaid onto improvisational patterns. Alvia Wardlaw, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston proclaimed that "the compositions of these quilts contrast dramatically with the ordered regularity associated with many styles of Euro-American quiltmaking. There's a brilliant, improvisational range of approaches to composition that is more often associated with the inventiveness and power of the leading 20th-century abstract painters than it is with textile-making." But the most compelling and lasting reviews came from New York Times' Michael Kimmelman, who raved "Imagine Matisse and Klee (if you think I'm wildly exaggerating, see the show) arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South in the form of women, descendants of slaves when Gee's Bend was a plantation."

Relevant sources to learn more

View more of their work at Souls Grown Deep
Check out this free documentary from PBS
Read the original exhibition review from the New York Times
Enjoy some other artist documentaries

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The Gee's Bend Quiltmakers: Art with Folk Traditions | Artland Magazine

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In 1859 a woman named Dinah was torn from her home in Africa and taken to the United States, to be sold for a dime to a man named Pettway. Pettway would bring her to Gee's Bend, Alabama, where she and her fellow slaves on his plantation became known as their owner's property, and forced, as was the convention, to adopt his surname.

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Rita Mae Pettway, Housetop (fractured medallion variation), 1977, corduroy, 80 x 76 inches (Virginia Museum of Fine Art). A conversation with Valerie Cassell Oliver, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Beth Harris.
Additional resources The quilting tradition at Gee's Bend from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Gee's Bend from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gee's Bend in the Library of Congress

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Valerie Cassel Oliver, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

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Rita Mae Pettway, Housetop (fractured medallion variation), 1977, corduroy, 80 x 76 inches (Virginia Museum of Fine Art). A conversation with Valerie Cassell Oliver, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Beth Harris.