Let’s play a game: how many modern American artists can you name? Think about it for a second. (I’ll wait.) Maybe you thought about Rothko, or Ruscha, or Warhol, or Walker. Maybe your mind exhausted its American options before wandering to a more international crowd – Matissa, Klee, Mondrian. All good guesses, of course, but not exactly the answer I’m looking for!
Would a hint help? I’m thinking of a centuries-old artist collective whose pieces have been heralded by the New York Times as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.” Ray Eames, Jackson Pollock, and Vogue editor Diana Vreeland were all collectors, and the collective has gone on to launch collaborations with institutions like Target, Anthropologie, and even the USPS. Art critics have praised their masterful art pieces as being “so eye-poppingly gorgeous that it’s hard to know how to begin to account for them,” and their work is now in the permanent collection of more than 40 museums on 3 different continents.
Stumped? You may not be alone – which is why today, I’m taking over the blog to share the world and work of the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers with you. If you’re not familiar, you’re in for a treat. (And if you are familiar, sit yourself back down – you know you’re in for a treat, too!)
Earlier this year, I picked up quilting. It started out of necessity – I couldn’t afford the bedding I’d been eyeing and decided to make it myself, emboldened by a moment of delirious self-confidence, a well-timed sale at JoAnn, and a beginner sewing class, in which I crafted the world’s ugliest pillow – but as it turns out, I love quilting. (Isn’t it great when that happens?)
So a few months ago, on the hunt for more knowledge, I turned to the library. There, I found this book by Modern Quilt Guild. Inside, two pieces by the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers – a Housetop quilt by Nettie Jane Kennedy and a Bricklayer quilt by Loretta Pettway, both of which found a home at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston – stopped me in my tracks.
Meet the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers
All of the quilts I’d seen previously were perfectly measured and ultra-precise, with stitching so neat that human handiwork was indiscernible from that of a machine. The art of each of these women from Gee’s Bend, however, left me moved. Their quilts were often created out of necessity – crafted from old dungarees, worn feed and flour sacks, hand-me-down fabric remnants, or other secondhand materials – and intended to keep their families comfortable and warm in homes that lacked running water, telephones, or electricity. “People are not really expressing enough love anymore,” Essie Pettway told the New York Times in 2018, “It’s at the center of what we do.“
And Miss Essie is right – the quilts really were an act of love. Every piece of fabric used was appreciated, and even visible stains or discoloration served as reminders of loved ones who often left nothing else behind. The quilt seen here by Missouri Pettway always makes me cry – it was sewn from the clothing of her husband, Nathaniel, after his death in 1941. “Mama say, ‘I going to take his work clothes, shape them into a quilt to remember him, and cover up under it for love,” her daughter Arlonzia shared. (It’s not pictured in this post because I’d be too busy sobbing to continue writing, obviously.)
So let’s get into it: let’s talk about Gee’s Bend, the women behind the art, and what the next century looks like. We’ll chat about how an isolated Alabama community developed an indigenous art style that rivals the Op Art greats, but we’ll also talk about why I take issue with some of the comparisons drawn. (And of course, there’s a little bit of drama, too.) I’ve been yappin’ to the EHD team about the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers for weeks – sweet Gretch and Mal have already heard this soliloquy in person, delivered on our recent team trip – so are you ready?
An Introduction
Buckle up: we’re heading back in time to Gee’s Bend, Alabama (government alias: Boykin, AL), a tiny town whose 305 residents and artists are direct descendants of once-enslaved cotton pickers. When the plantation-owning Gee Family accrued too much debt in the mid-1800s, they relinquished ownership of their 30-year-old plantation – including the lives of 98 enslaved people – to Mark H. Pettway, a small-town sheriff in North Carolina.
And I’m going to state the obvious: this guy, Mark H. Pettway, was awful. He transported his family and his belongings in a wagon train, while his enslaved workforce of 100 men, women, and children were forced to walk over 700 miles to their new homes in Alabama. (Many of the artists in Gee’s Bend still carry his last name today, and the art of 60 different Pettways has since been professionally documented. You’ll see much of their work here.)
After the Civil War, Boykin remained mostly unchanged. While enslaved people had technically been emancipated, the quiltmaker’s ancestors were forced to work as sharecroppers, a job that saddled their families with never-ending debts to the Pettway family.
But as cotton prices began to fall in the 1920s and 1930s, the land-owning farmers in the town of Gee’s Bend found themselves accruing debts of their own. So much debt, in fact, that a local merchant was able to foreclose on the entire town in 1932. Food. Livestock. Farm equipment. Tools. Heirlooms – all were gone in seconds. The remaining residents of Gee’s Bend – men and women who’d been moved there by force – were left destitute, by no fault of their own.
Enter: Franklin Roosevelt. (Seriously.) In 1937, the federal government purchased 10,000 acres of the former Pettway plantation and provided low-interest loans to the families of Gee’s Bend, which allowed residents to buy back the land formerly worked by their ancestors. As nearly 6 million Black Americans journeyed away from the South between 1916 and 1970, Gee’s Bend residents were able to stay in the place they’d come to call home and the shoots of a rich, multigenerational cultural quilt-making tradition began to blossom.
But remaining in Alabama was a double edged sword. Because of the remote location and lack of transportation, Gee’s Bend’s artists weren’t afforded the same opportunities received by their coastal and metropolitan counterparts. The first paved road into Gee’s Bend wasn’t laid until 1967; when car-less community members began taking the ferry to a nearby town where they could register to vote, authorities responded by suspending ferry service altogether. Gee’s Bend – a town surrounded by water on three sides – had been swiftly and intentionally isolated, again. (Ferry service wasn’t restored until 2006, nearly 40 years after it had been eliminated.)
An Exercise In Resilience
Once again, the community of Gee’s Bend had to figure out how to stay afloat – and this time, women took the lead. One day, in a small Baptist Church, more than 60 quiltmakers (and one Episcopal priest) from rural Alabama joined forces to found the Freedom Quilting Bee, the county’s first Black-owned business and one of the first Black women’s cooperatives in America.
The Bee began to sell quilts across the country and eventually landed major contracts with brands like Bloomingdales and Sears, inspiring a renewed nationwide interest in textile arts. 100 years after the first quilt had been stitched, Gees Bend was the quilt capitol of America…or at least, that’s how it should have gone down.
The Second Revival
But it wasn’t meant to be: Bloomingdales dropped the Bee’s quilts (they were “too irregular” for the brand’s tastes); Sears had the artists producing nothing but corduroy pillow shams. Without the visibility and promotion from these larger retailers, the art from Gee’s Bend began to fade into the background. Art collectors returned to the world of paint and photography; consumers hopped on the next trend train. The quilting continued, but the fanfare subsided.
And this is also where the story starts to get a little messy (in my eyes, at least). We’re leaping forward to 1998 when William Arnett, a collector and purveyor of Black American art, stumbled upon a photo of a Gee’s Bend quilt by Annie Mae Young. After enlisting his son to help with the technical research – some things never change, parents! – he hoofed it to Alabama, unannounced, and began knocking on doors and buying up quilts. (“Soon the word spread through Gee’s Bend that there was a crazy white man in town paying good money for raggedy old quilts,” the Smithsonian jokes.)
A few years later, Arnett sees his opening: he learns of a last-minute exhibition cancellation at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and he convinces the curator (a friend, of course) to debut his collection of quilts from Boykin. The show, officially titled “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” opened in September 2002 to immediate critical acclaim. The response is glowing; the demand is instant. The quilts tour through every prestigious art museum in every major city in America.
“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,” raved the New York Times’ art critic. But if this description gave you pause for an uncertain reason, you’re not alone – can we talk about it for a second?
Amelia Peck, the American Art curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sums up my feelings towards the comparison in this 2018 book on Gee’s Bend: “It’s something like a party trick,” she writes, referring to the tendency of critics and museums to promote comparisons between esteemed painters and the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers. “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?’”
In a later interview with the Met Museum, she explains further. “For a long time, critics compared graphic quilts to abstract art painted by men as an easy way to make sense of them and to make them into something more valuable than just a bed covering—more of a “real” work of art…earlier generations couldn’t see them as anything other than domestic. ‘Women’ and ‘domestic’ are uncomfortable categories for most classically trained art critics; a useful object made by women for the home that also happened to be beautiful was not considered art…the women of Gee’s Bend had an intentional vision: they were composing artworks by putting pieces of various fabrics together, no differently than the other artists in the show would compose a painting or an assemblage.”
Peck’s words resonated strongly with me, and I hope they do with you, too. I’ve always been frustrated by the delineation between “art” and “craft” – so often, we lessen women’s cultural contributions and push female artists into obscurity. I’ll tell you one thing: these Alabama-based quiltmakers ARE artists. Full stop. And if their work had been painted by men instead of sewn by women, we all would have learned their names in Art History class.
Gee’s Bend is home to one of the richest, deepest, and longest-running American art traditions. If any other town in the country produced this many prolific painters, or sculptors, or photographers, it’d be front-page news – it’s time to start singing the Gee’s Bend praises a little more loudly, methinks. (Quilting has brought me so much fulfillment and joy and I just wish I had learned about the art form sooner, you know?)
RANT OVER. Back on track! Following a successful museum debut, more than 50 Gee’s Benders came together to form the Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective, an organization designed to help the women sell and market their work. (And psst, it’s still active! As an added bonus, they also host quilting retreats! Should we all go?!)
The momentum kept rolling, too – in 2006, the U.S. Postal Service issued a series of commemorative postage stamps featuring quilts from Gee’s Bend, and demand for work was at an all-time high. Quilters signed licensing deals left and right, and their work was printed on tumblers, calendars, scarves, pet-safe rugs, and so much more (quilts even made their way onto VISA’s gift cards, if you can believe it).
Nothing Gold Can Stay
If you’re reading this and wondering if these women ever catch a break, the answer is…no, they don’t. Do you remember William Arnett? You know – the art collector who showed up unannounced?
Well, in 2007, Arnett was sued by three Gee’s Bend women – including Annie Mae Young, the artist who sparked Arnett’s love of Boykin’s quilters – who alleged they weren’t properly compensated for their art. The lawsuit was quickly resolved and quietly settled out of court, but it begged a familiar question that we’re still kicking around today: are these artists being taken advantage of?
At the time, most quilters seemed happy with the arrangement Arnett had offered, and the other artists he represented were quick to defend him. “Martin Luther King got us out of the cotton patch; the Arnetts got us out from under the bedsprings and onto the museum walls,” quilter Nettie Young told the New York Times in 2007. “I don’t know what they sued for. They ain’t told me, and I ain’t asked them.” (I’d highly encourage reading the NYT’s lawsuit coverage – the topic is nuanced and I’d love to hear your take.)
To that end, William Arnett is a really interesting character in this story. Sure, he made a career of bringing underrepresented artists to the masses – but he’s also done it in a way that worries his professional contacts in the art world. Arnett often bankrolled his own untrained artists – many of whom relied on him for income while waiting for their art careers to launch – but it can be hard to trust that he’s always had the purest intentions. Was he an ally who utilized every resource available to shine a light on the works of Black artists, or was he taking advantage of poor artists who lacked context?
“Curator, gallerist, advocate, promoter, patron — those are all categories that, in the art world, we try to keep barriers between,” Susan Krane, a museum curator, explained to the New Yorker. “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.“
The suits didn’t stop Arnett, however. In 2010, he founded the Souls Grown Deep Foundation – a nonprofit organization dedicated to “promoting the work of Black artists from the American South and supporting their communities by fostering economic empowerment, racial and social justice, and educational advancement.”
Upon its inception, the Souls Grown Deep launched a multi-year campaign to transfer the majority of the works in its care – a number once estimated to be around 1,100 – to leading art museums worldwide. To date, the foundation has found permanent museum homes for over 500 of the pieces in its collection.
Back In Boykin
But back in Gee’s Bend – or Boykin, if we’re being formal – the residual effects of nationwide acclaim are hard to feel. “All of the publicity would be good if it would help build up our community. But the quilts are the only thing going on here. We need grants, we need help from the outside,” Nancy Pettway told the Associated Press almost 20 years ago.
And sadly, there’s still much to be done. In 2014, Wilcox County made headlines as the poorest county in America, while Boykin received special recognition as the poorest section of the county. Most quilters drive hours to get to and from their jobs, and government officials say they don’t have funds to finance any of the necessary or requested improvements to the town.
The Souls Grown Deep Foundation has a plan to turn things around, though, and they’re looking to another art-based town as a model. (They’re a pretty dynamic character in this story, don’t you think?)
The inspiration: Marfa, Texas. Much like Boykin, it’s a tiny town in a similarly remote location, tucked 3 hour drive from the nearest airport and 60 miles from the Mexican border. Founded in the 1880s as a railroad water stop, Marfa was transformed into a minimalist art mecca when artist Donald Judd moved to town, bought up a few buildings, and began installing a series of now-iconic art pieces. Marfa has since rebranded as a haven for artists and a must-see destination for, well, anyone with an Instagram account. (I mean, you’ve definitely seen the Prada Marfa store, right?)
But if Marfa, a hot, inaccessible, desert town can transform into a playground for the art world’s rich and famous…why can’t Gee’s Bend do something similar? Could Boykin be the next big hotspot for history buffs, craft enthusiasts, and modern art appreciators alike? It’s worth a shot. (The foundation is mindful of maintaining the culture of the small town, however: “There won’t be any G6s landing—this is a bus trip,” the president of Souls Grown Deep told Artnet in 2020.)
Another plan is on the docket, too: the artists in Gee’s Bend have collaborated with Nest, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the art of handmade craft. The partnership is designed to make the quilts from Boykin more accessible, and the plan is already working – you can now buy quilts directly from several of Gee’s Bend finest artists on Etsy, and two third-generation quilters (Delia Thibodeaux and Caster Pettway) launched a Gee’s Bend collection with Target this past February.
Moving forward, the community hopes to build cultural centers, quilting hubs, marketplaces for local goods, community-run housing for tourists, and walking trails. In a conversation with Artnet, Mary Margaret Pettway revealed her dream for Gee’s Bend in 2030: “Virtually every house would have a marker, and people can go and tap their smartphones and pull up information about that quilter,” she said. “It would be something to see. We are living history.” (She’s right.)
Just for the record, things are looking up in Boykin. In 2015, three Gee’s Bend quilters – Mary Lee Bendolph, Loretta Pettway, and Lucy Mingo – were named National Heritage Fellows by the National Endowment of the Arts. (About time!)
And in 2022, a renewed and reinvigorated Freedom Quilting Bee team launched the first annual Airing of the Quilts Festival – based on the classic, generations-old tradition, where quilters would hang their finished works outside – which has since drawn thousands of tourists and visitors to the tiny Alabama town. (This year’s event is on October 12, if anyone’s interested in making the trek. It’s actually pretty close to my birthday and I’ve never been to Alabama, so I’m eyeing the trip myself!)
WOW, THAT’S A LOT OF INFORMATION. You still with me?
I’ve just been charmed and moved by the poignant stories and inherent drive of these artists. The quilters started with so little – just a few scraps of fabric – but they developed a fresh, unexpected, and timeless visual vernacular that survived through slavery, through the antebellum South, through the Jim Crow era, and that continues to inspire today. Their use of color, pattern, and texture – it’s all masterful. The work is just as exciting and vibrant today as it was in the 1800s. If you have some time to spare today, take a moment to scroll through the visual archive here. I’ve shared 30 of my favorite pieces above, but there are so many more where that came from.
The women of Gee’s Bend inspired me to dive deeper into a hobby that’s introduced me to new friends, taught me new skills, gotten me off my phone, and given me permission to flex my creative muscles in ways I never would have expected. I think we could probably all learn a little something from them, you know? Happy Juneteenth. xx
PS. For more information on the Black quilting tradition in America – because you know it goes beyond Boykin, baby! – check out this piece by Shantay Robinson in Black Art in America. It’s a quick, smart read. You’ll love it – I promise.
THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED HERE.
