The Quilts of Gee's Bend
"..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 in the form of women, descendants of slaves when Gee's Bend was a plantation. These women, closely bound by family and custom (many Benders bear the slaveowner's name, Pettway), spent their precious spare time -- while not rearing children, chopping wood, hauling water and plowing fields -- splicing scraps of old cloth to make robust objects of amazingly refined, eccentric abstract designs. The best of these designs, unusually minimalist and spare, are so eye-poppingly gorgeous that it's hard to know how to begin to account for them. But then, good art can never be fully accounted for, just described."
Michael Kimmelman
New
York Times November 29, 2002
A second Gee's Bend quilt exhibition opened at the Museum of Fine
Arts in Houston in June 2006 and will travel throughout the country for
the next two years. Read
more
For more information or to purchase any of these quilts contact Shelly
Zegart: zegrtquilt@aol.com
Newly
Acquired!!!
Gee's Bend Quilts From a Private Collection
This group of quilts was purchased by a private collector from the women of Gee's Bend through Bill Arnett more than ten years ago. This same collector has also assembled and donated a significant folkart collection to his local art museum, where he has been actively involved for many years.
These quilts represent the work of most of the well-known quiltmakers and some of their families. Many of the quilts were made early in their careers. This is your opportunity to own one of these treasures from the amazing quiltmakers from Gee's Bend. They have not been offered publicly until now.
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America Irby and/or
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Quiltmakers from Boligee (Greene County), Alabama
Some of the Boligee quiltmakers had relatives in Gee's Bend. However, Boligee, in Greene County, southwest of Tuscaloosa, is not as isolated geographically as Gee's Bend (Wilcox County, AL).
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Quiltmakers from Mt. Pelia, Lee County, Alabama
Some of the Mt. Pelia quiltmakers had relatives in Gee's Bend. However, unlike Gee's Bend (Wilcox County, AL), the Mt. Pelia community, in Lee County, in the Auburn, AL metropolitan area, is not geographically isolated.
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Email | 502-897-7566 |The Quilts of Gee's Bend Museum Dates