Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt examines the resurgence of interest in quilting in the Gee´s Bend community and documents the development of key traditional quilt patterns—housetop, courthouse steps, flying geese, and strip quilting through the presentation of outstanding examples created from the 1930s into the twenty-first century.

"The women of Gee's Bend are at long-last getting the recognition they deserve as artists, and that is especially gratifying to the museum," said Peter C. Marzio, director of the MFAH. "Their command of materials and design is genius; their body of work, further distinguished by its historical and cultural significance, is clearly a facet of contemporary American art. With Gee´s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt, the museum hopes to bring this story to those who have not yet seen it and to deepen the appreciation of those who have."

"Women in Gee's Bend learned the craft of quilting from their mothers and grandmothers," said Alvia J. Wardlaw, MFAH curator of modern and contemporary art, who is organizing the exhibition. "It was a skill born of necessity and make-do conditions, but they transformed quilt making — this chore — into the highest form of artistic expression, where innovation and individuality were prized. Gee´s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt will explore how the artists improvised on certain traditional motifs and trace the family quilting lineage of some master quilters."

The 70 quilts in the exhibition, none previously presented to the public, will demonstrate how the quilters improvise upon the structure or "architecture" of the quilt to create a work of art that is based upon a traditional quilt pattern while simultaneously creating a visual vocabulary that is stylistically identifiable as Gee's Bend. Each pattern will be examined with visual examples detailing various interpretations. New works by granddaughters and great-granddaughters of some of the master quilt makers will be shown, along with quilts not previously exhibited by quilt makers Mary Lee Bendolph and Mary L. Bennett.

Catalogue
Accompanying the exhibition is an extensive catalogue by Bernard Herman, director of the Center for American Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware. In his catalogue essay, Herman compares the works in the exhibition to the structured compositions of both Piet Mondrian and Esther Mahlangu, a Ndebele house painter from South Africa. Other catalogue contributors include Lauren Whitley, Dilys Blum, Diane Mott, Joanne Cubbs, and Maggie Gordon.

Tour Schedule
After Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt closes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, it will embark on a tour of the following museums:
• Indianapolis Museum of Art, October 8 — December 31, 2006
• Orlando Museum of Art, January 28 — April 22, 2007
• The Walters Art Museum, June 17 — August 26, 2007
• Tacoma Museum of Art, September 25 — December 9, 2007
• The Speed Art Museum, January 2, 2008 — March 16, 2008
• Denver Museum of Art, April 13 — July 6, 2008
• Philadelphia Museum of Art, August 2 — October 2, 2008

About Gee's Bend
The quilts in the exhibition are drawn from the collection of Tinwood Alliance, a non-profit foundation for the support of African-American vernacular art, founded by William Arnett. Arnett first traveled to the area in 1997 in search of Annie Mae Young, whose picture he had seen in Roland Freeman´s book on African-American quilters, Communion of the Spirit, along with her quilt. Young pointed him to Gee's Bend, a community of about 750 residents isolated on a U-shaped sliver of land on the Alabama River. Lacking ferry service, Benders, as residents are called, are an hour´s drive from the county seat of Camden, the closest source of supplies, schools, and medical services. Geographically isolated, the women in the community created quilts from whatever materials were available, in patterns of their own imaginative design.

Gee's Bend was named after Joseph Gee, the first white man to stake a claim there in the early 1800s. The Gee family sold the plantation to Mark Pettway in 1845 and most present-day residents are descendants of slaves on the former Pettway plantation. Their forebears continued to work the land as tenant farmers after emancipation, and many eventually bought the farms from the government in the 1940s.

Gee's Bend became known for its quilts, briefly, during the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1960s when the Freedom Quilting Bee was organized. Many quilters in the community represent second-generation quilting within a family.

This exhibition was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Tinwood Alliance, Atlanta.

 

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