Gee's Bend Quilts

I was first introduced to the extraordinary tradition of the Gees Bend Quilts by Scott Perkins - director of Preservations and Collections at Fallingwater.

Their inclusion in this year’s wonderful Turner Contemporary show at Margate - We Will Walk ; Art and Resistance in the American South - is the first time the quilts have been shown in the UK. When our planned visit to Margate in March was cancelled, I thought I might never see them in the flesh. So I was really delighted to catch them, in the final days of the show last month.

Bars by Annie Mae Young (c 1965). Photograph: Estate of Annie Mae Young

To quote from curator Hannah Collin’s text accompanying the exhibition:

Gee’s Bend is a small community located on a former plantation in Alabama. It lies on a spit of land surrounded by the Alabama River. This deeply rural community has become world famous for their unique hand-made quilts created by women for their own use and gradually recognised and collected by outsiders.

Linked to their maker’s history of poverty and hard labour on the cotton plantation, the quilts are made from repurposed materials. They contain abstract visual languages that have developed in isolation over a hundred years. The ferry that linked Gee’s Bend to Camden, the nearest town, was removed in order to prevent residents from registering the right to vote and from voting during the 1960’s and was not re-instated for forty years.

The abstract compositions of these quilts contain historical echoes of African textiles combined with observations of the Southern landscape. Like blues music and yard art they are acts of improvisation. Made from used clothing such as blue jeans and football shirts, their materials follow the history of American clothing, as fabrics have developed and changed. It was relatively common for plantation owners to name their enslaved workers with their own names, which remain as a symbol of a terrible past. Many of the quilters are descendants of people enslaved on the Pettway Plantation, which is reflected in their names to this day.

Installation photograph © Stephen White.
Quilts by Mary Lee Bendolph, Louisiana Bendolph, Henrietta Pettway, Loretta Pettway, Louella Pettway, Pearlie Pettway Hall, Annie Mae Young

The quilts hang and lie in the gallery as great abstract canvases. The compositions and colours are masterful - a real lesson in surety and confidence.

Basket Weave Variation by Mary Lee Bendolph (c 1990). Photograph: © Mary Lee Bendolph/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Yet it was the materiality and the functionality of the pieces which meant most to me - their very ‘quiltness’. These are pieces made from old and worn textiles which each bring their own narrative to the quilt. Particularly unexpected to me was the use of corduroy work wear - the nap of the fabric turned this way and that to beautiful visual effect. Others use worn denim - showing all the signs of age and wear: sun-bleaching; patching; hems taken up and down; pockets removed to reveal darker patches.

I loved the sense of all the lives which are stitched into the quilts - the lives of the people who wore the clothes, the lives of the quilt-makers, the lives of those who used the quilts. They feel like rare treasures indeed.

“Bars” Work-Clothes Quilt by artist Pearlie Kennedy Pettway. Made in 1950. Photo courtesy of Souls Grown Deep. © 2018 [Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio] / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The two images here are not from the exhibition, but I have included them as they show this quality of the layering of history and narrative so strongly. I find them very moving.

Blocks and Stripes Work-Clothes Quilt by Lucy Mooney. 1935. Cotton, denim, and wool. Photo courtesy of Souls Grown Deep. © 2018 [Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio] / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

For more please see the following links:

Hannah Collins - We Will Walk
Design Sponge - Black History Month Spotlight: Gees Bend Quilts
Souls Grown Deep
Guardian - exhibtion review