The intricate and colourful pulsating patterns and geometries of quilts often reappeared in fashion collections, while different artists recreated the quilting technique from personal and imaginative points of view. But there are quilts that could be considered as more important from a cultural and historical rather than a merely visual perspective – the ones made by the Alabama-based all-black community Gee's Bend, representing a key chapter in the history of American art and featured in the permanent collections of over 20 leading art museums.
Located at the arc of a bend of the Alabama River within Wilcox County, in the United States, the town of Boykin was originally known as Gee's Bend, after a landowner and slaveholder, Joseph Gee, who in 1816 settled in the area and built a cotton plantation.
After the Civil War, descendants of the slaves who had worked on the plantation worked as sharecroppers and, in the 1940s, the land of the former plantation in Boykin was sold in plots by the United States government to local families still living in the Bend.
Black and Native residents of the area gained ownership over the same land their families had once forcibly worked within. In this way, while with The Great Migration over six million African Americans, forced by economic circumstances, moved from the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest, and West, most Gee's Bend's residents remained in Alabama. Many of the current residents are therefore descendants of the enslaved people who worked on the plantation.
The quilting tradition in the area can be traced back to the 19th and 20th century, originally the quilts were produced for functional purposes and family use, the complexity of their designs reflecting the complex lives of the women who made them.
As the decades passed, the aim and purpose of the quilts changed: in the 1960s, encouraged by Martin Luther King, Jr's visit, community members became active in the Civil Rights Movement, ferrying to the county seat at Camden to register to vote. Authorities reacted by eliminating ferry service, a move that ended up isolating the community and cutting it off from basic services.
Local women came therefore together and founded the Freedom Quilting Bee (established in 1966 in Rehoboth, Alabama, and remaining in operation until 2012). The workers' cooperative provided much-needed economic opportunity and political empowerment, playing a key role in political consciousness-raising.
Further cooperatives were founded in more recent years, among them Gee's Bend Quilters Collective (established in 2003), with a precise aim in mind - reinventing the traditions and expanding the art of quilting.
As proved by a new group exhibition on view at Hauser & Wirth in New York, there are quite a few artists who are bringing forward this textile art.
Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, "The New Bend" currently explores the legacy of Gee's Bend bringing together 12 contemporary artists working in the quilting and textile practice - Anthony Akinbola, Eddie R. Aparicio, Dawn Williams Boyd, Diedrick Brackens (winner of The Studio Museum in Harlem's Wein Prize in 2018 for his woven works), Tuesday Smillie, Tomashi Jackson, Genesis Jerez, Basil Kincaid, Eric N. Mack, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Qualeasha Wood, and Zadie Xa.
"The New Bend" also marks the 20th anniversary of the groundbreaking exhibition "The Quilts at Gee's Bend" first presented at The Whitney Museum of Art (2002-2003) and curated by Raina Lampkins-Fielder.
While acknowledging the work of Gee's Bend's quilters such as Sarah Benning (b. 1933), Missouri Pettway (1902-1981), Lizzie Major (1922-2011), Sally Bennett Jones (1944-1988) and Mary Lee Bendolph (b.1935), the event tries to look at the future, tracing an invisible thread between times and artists and exploring the new language created by innovative artists who are establishing a dialogue with the past and honouring Gee's Bend's legacy.Some of the artists included feature in their works traditional elements like geometrical motifs, but most of them tend to use the quilts as tapestries, to tell stories or comment about contemporary issues.
In this way they create a parallelism with the original Gee's Bend's quilts that had more than just a functional value as slaves used quilts as maps to share and transmit secret messages (told through quilt blocks) to escape slavery and travel the Underground Railroad. Just like the original quilts these new pieces bear therefore political and social messages.
A few of the works on display, among them Genesis Jerez's "Blue Ballerina" or Sojourner Truth Parsons' "Red Goes Away", could be considered as paintings made using fabrics, while the power of craft shines through Diedrick Brackens' woven piece "Survival is a Shrine Not the Small Space Near the Limit of Life".
Dawn Williams Boyd employs instead donated or second-hand textiles (carefully removed from a variety of clothes including vintage prom dresses or wedding gowns to add more levels to her work) and quilting, embroidery and beading techniques to stitch a representation of modern America as experienced by minority groups. Through her works the artist tackles themes such as xenophobia and immigration, feminine sexuality, abortion rights and systemic racism.
There are artists who try to go beyond the traditional shape of the quilt: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio's "Holbein en Crenshaw (Washington Blvd. and Crenshaw Blvd, LA, CA)" is a multimedia collage referencing Crenshaw Boulevard, the historic main street of black Los Angeles. This piece has got a Pop Art quality about it, incorporating rubber, tree and paint residue and found cloth.
Anthony Akinbola's "Jubilee", seems to melt on the canvas, flowing from its confined spaces and Eric N. Mack's work can be hardly contained in the gallery space.
Some of the artists included in this event also seem to have a dichotomous approach to art: London-based Canadian artist Zadie Xa integrates in her artworks geometrical motifs borrowed from Gee's Bend's aesthetics with Korean elements; New York-based Qualeasha Wood creates collage-like tapestries using digital images (see her work "Ctrl+Alt+Del").
Technology and innovative techniques are actually important points in the production of these artists: there's indeed more behind the silk organza, cotton, tulle and vintage fabrics employed in these pieces, as cutting and stitching have changed, also thanks to new digital and computational means.
In a press release for this show Hauser & Wirth remind us that Audrey Bennett, University of Michigan Professor of Art and Design, coined the term "heritage algorithms" in 2016 to denote the goal of "not reducing culture to code, but expanding coding to embrace culture." The new wave of quilters represents a generation of creators and artisans who are looking at art history, but also at science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, which means that Gee's Bend's textile art may evolve in future in unexpected ways, thanks to a perfect mix between heritage, crafts and STEM disciplines.
Comments