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<\/a>A Gee’s Bend Quilt at Hoole by Mary Ann Pettway, 2006<\/p><\/div>\n
The quilters of Gee\u2019s Bend have a unique place not only in Alabama history, but in modern American art as well. Dated November 2, 2006, our quilt shows how the Gee\u2019s Bend legacy lives on in the 21st Century. Though it is not as abstract as some of the more famous examples, Mary Ann Pettway\u2019s Halloween quilt still displays some of the asymmetric qualities that make Gee\u2019s Bend quilts so unique in American textiles.<\/p>\n
Gee\u2019s Bend is located in Wilcox County in the Black Belt of Alabama. Enclosed on three sides by the Alabama River, the area was first settled around 1816, when Joseph Gee founded a plantation on the river. Several thousand acres passed from the Gee family to Mark Pettway of North Carolina in 1845. Pettway forced his slaves to march across four states to join the more than 100 slaves that already belonged to the Gee plantation. Many of the citizens of Gee\u2019s Bend retain the Pettway name to this day, including Mary Ann Pettway, who made this quilt.<\/p>\n
After the Civil War, many of the former slaves remained in the area and became tenant farmers. The local population suffered yet again when the value of cotton dropped nearly ninety percent in the 1920s, and then became a social experiment in the New Deal during the 1930s. Several of the Farm Security Administration photographers visited Gee\u2019s Bend, including Arthur Rothstein and Marion Post Wolcott. Their photos helped bring government attention to Gee\u2019s Bend. Several federal and state agencies bought property, built houses, and sold homesteads to the former tenant farmers. Owning property allowed several generations of Gee\u2019s Bend residents to remain in the area, long after the local economy ceased to support small farmers. This continuity contributed to the residents developing their unique quilting styles.<\/p>\n
The 1960s brought more changes to Gee\u2019s Bend; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. visited in 1965 and inspired many residents to march with him from Selma to Montgomery in support of voting rights. In retribution, many of the residents were jailed, fired by their white employers, had bank loans unexpectedly called in, or had the few remaining tenant farms bulldozed. The river ferry service \u2013 the only way to get from Gee\u2019s Bend to the county seat to vote, minus an unpaved dirt road \u2013 was abruptly cancelled, and would not be restored for thirty years.<\/p>\n
That decade also brought the birth of the Freedom Quilting Bee, which formed to raise money for the families in the area. Sears hired the Bee to make standard bedcovers and pillow shams for department stores, which provided steady work for seamstresses and plenty of scraps. However, by the early 1980s, the Bee was mostly inoperative, and Gee\u2019s Bend might have passed into history as a footnote except for the efforts of Atlanta art dealer William Arnett.<\/p>\n
Arnett began his career collecting Asian and Mediterranean art, and shifted into African art in the 1970s. In the 1980s, he became interested in art by African-Americans in the Deep South, in particular that of Thornton Dial and Lonnie Holley.\u00a0 Arnett was familiar with quilting traditions in other African-American communities in the South, and was stunned by the quilts he discovered in Gee\u2019s Bend in the late 1990s. Arnett began buying quilts in the area. He was already in the process of editing a massive book, Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South. Arnett helped put together an exhibit of Gee\u2019s Bend quilts, which were shown in museums across the country in 2002-2005. The art world began to take notice after a glowing review in the New York Times called the quilts \u201ceye-poppingly gorgeous\u201d and compared them to Matisse and Klee. Gee\u2019s Bend experienced a quilting renaissance. The cooperative was reformed, and many women in the area work there today.<\/p>\n
The renaissance has not been without its controversies; several of the quilters have sued Arnett over profit disputes. Arnett has often been criticized for his interactions with the artists he promotes, most famously by a 1993 episode of \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d which depicted Arnett as exploitative, buying art from poor, uneducated Southern blacks and selling to other rich, white art collectors. The truth, as always, is considerably more complex; Arnett has profited from his tireless promotion of African-American vernacular art, but so have his artists. Without his support, the quilts and quilters of Gee\u2019s Bend would not have experienced the respect and acclaim they do today. Many of the more recent quilts, including our Halloween quilt, might not have been made at all, were it not for this renewed interest in Gee\u2019s Bend and its people. Their quilts hang on the walls of some of America\u2019s most prestigious museums, and are included in collections like ours at Hoole, but many of the families of Gee\u2019s Bend still live in the kind of poverty that characterizes rural, Black Belt Alabama.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the best reading of the quilts of Gee\u2019s Bend, and their inclusion in our archive, prompt us to think not only of how far we have come in valuing the history and artistic contribution of these women, but also of how far we have yet to go.<\/p>\n
For further reading, see:<\/b><\/p>\n
<\/b>Dewan, Shaila. \u201cHandmade Alabama Quilts Find Fame and Controversy<\/a>.\u201d The New York Times<\/i>. 29 July 2007.<\/p>\n Kimmelman, Michael. \u201cJazzy Geometry, Cool Quilters<\/a>.\u201d The New York Times<\/i>. 29 November 2002.<\/p>\n Moerringer, J.R. \u201cCrossing Over<\/a>.\u201d L.A. Times<\/i>. 22 August 1999.<\/p>\n Wallach, Amei. \u201cFabric of Their Lives<\/a>.\u201d Smithsonian Magazine<\/i>. October 2006.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By: Ellie Campbell, JD and University of Alabama MLIS graduate student The Wade Hall and Gregg Swem American Quilts Collection contains quilts from the mid-nineteenth century up to the present day that demonstrate the breadth and depth of this American … Continue reading