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Written by Gwendolyn Rice

The Quilts of Gee's Bend

Posted 1-8-12

In creating a play around the story of newly discovered photographs and the debate over who owns them, I found that it worked well with other themes I wanted to explore: the tension between unknown craftsmen, the art dealers who discover them, the public who clamor for their work, and the money that changes hands.

The peculiar irony of “outsider,” “primitive,” or “folk” artists who are embraced by the conventional art world was illustrated poignantly for me a few years earlier, when the quilts of Gee’s Bend were featured at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and then the Whitney Museum in New York. As a quilter myself I was fascinated with the unusual patterns, fabrics, and techniques employed in these pieces, created by a group of African American women from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, one of the poorest communities in the country.

Mainstream American quilting has evolved from nineteenth century farm wives sewing pretty patchwork blankets to keep the family warm, to a $3.6 billion industry catering to crafters who enjoy sewing and expressing their creativity with fabric. And while modern quilters generally follow established patterns, painstakingly recreating blocks with high quality cotton fabrics, the quilts of Gee’s Bend are asymmetrical, improvisational, made from any fabric that was available, including old clothes and jeans.

Not only were the designs bold, striking, and utterly unlike anything I had seen before, the story of the quilters who created them was harrowing. Through racism, geography, and a legacy of poverty, Gee’s Bend had been virtually cut off from the outside world for decades. Most of its residents were descendents of slaves from the original plantation who worked the fields to survive for more than a century. Pictures of their homes were startling – primitive wooden shacks, many did not have electricity, phones, or indoor plumbing until the 1970s.

The quilts that originated here gained acclaim not only for their humble beginnings, but for their aesthetic achievements. New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman wrote that the “eye-poppingly gorgeous Gee’s Bend quilts turn out to be some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced. Imagine Matisse and Klee arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South.” Curator Jane Livingston, who helped organize the original exhibition, said that the quilts “rank with the finest abstract art of any tradition.”

When the frenzy around the quilts was at its peak, I saw a news story on TV about the quilters. The group of strong, gentle, deeply religious African American women, largely uneducated, living near the poverty line, took a bus from Alabama to New York to see their work exhibited. They were met at the museum by William Arnett, the wealthy (white) art dealer who had purchased many of the pieces and introduced the quilts to the rest of the world. When he was profiled, it was hard not to assume that he was exploiting these women in the most patronizing way.

I have no doubt that anyone who has viewed these quilts is grateful that they were discovered and brought to a larger stage. And I am sure that the Gee’s Bend quilters’ notoriety has brought them a level of economic security that would been difficult to achieve otherwise. But when I saw the quilt designs licensed to Anthropologie and Pottery Barn, I wondered who had benefitted the most from this phenomenon.

Ultimately the play draws inspiration from Gee’s Bend in the conversations between a curator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a local representative of a quilt guild, arguing about the terms of a contract for an exhibition of unusual quilts created on the plain of western Kansas.

 ~ Gwendolyn Rice, FTC communications director, playwright, and quilter