Gee’s Bend Quilts
 

Gee’s Bend Quilts

April 2018
 

squares

neo~local design

 

The women of a remote Alabama community have passed down a unique Quiltmaking form that offers an invaluable insight on the ‘visual’ component of the Afro-American culture: beyond the legacy of musical expressions such as the blues and jazz

 

 

The ‘discovery’ of quilts in the rural community of Gee’s Bend in Alabama has brought to life an important component of Afro-American culture and of its visual artistic expression.
In Alabama river’s Gee’s bend, right in the heart of the ‘Black Belt’, not far form Selma, symbol of the Afro-American community struggle for civil rights in the 60’s, a group of women, following the track of North-American rural tradition, have created their quilts for many decades.

Descendands of a community of slaves situated in a former plantation, an area that during the Great Depression was labeled as one of the poorest in the country, Gee’s Bend craftswomen only could use what was available around them: fabric samples, worn denim, used cotton sacks.  Working in the pauses in the agricultural season and in the few very moments left free from their household chores.

Negroes, descendants of former slaves of the Pettway Plantation’, 1937, Gees Bend, Alabama, Arthur Rothstein per la U.S. Farm Security Administration.
‘Girl at Gees Bend’ (Artelia Bendolph), 1937, photo by Arthur Rothstein for the U.S. Farm Security Administration (Library of Congress).


It’s the patchwork, something that in  traditional quilting equals to putting together scraps, fragments, to achieve a combination between utilitarian purposes and a need of artistic expression. A word that recalls a very peculiar human experience, usually connected to manual crafts’ ancient weaving practices carried out through time by women all around the world, but that has recently also been used to mean to ways of combining work and living.

The community’s extreme isolation and the peculiar expertise passed down, generation after generation, confers to Gee’s Bend quits a totally original formula. Its about compositions of unexpected minimalist simplicity, where the indigo and pale blue of old worn denim overalls is blended, with exceptional sensitivity, in geometrical triumphs dotted with orange, red, mustard, and other bright hues.

Work-clothes quilt with center medallion of strips, 1976, Annie Mae Young.
Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.


Whereas the scarcity of resources made possible for unedited creative abilities to emerge, the lack of contacts with the outside word has fostered a rare degree of cultural continuity – up to three or four generations of women in a family – in the transmission of expertise in quilting craft.

 House top sampler variation, 1950s, Annie Mae Young.

 

String-pieced quilt, Loretta Pettway, 1960.
Souls Grown Deep Foundation.

Just like for the gospels, from which – through the dark age of slavery – the blues and jazz originated, this unique form of visual artistic endeavor directly recalls the original culture of African women and man turned onto slaves. Human beings who, as Peter Marzio – Director of Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts – highlighted in his foreword to the first volume to celebrate the Gee’s Bend quilts’ creativity, where  “dislodged from everything except their memories”. (Beardsley, J., The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, Tinwood books, Atlanta Georgia, USA, 2002).

Caption

In their uniqueness and thanks to their expressive strenght Gee’s Bend quilts instinctively evoke bits of human stories, peculiar contexts, historical phases and a section of the population – women – offering, through day-to-day artifacts that combine utilitarian and expressive purposes, a key to understanding human life.

 

 

Nicolò Ceccarelli

Associate Professor, Alghero School of Design

 

Associate Professor in Design at the Alghero Department of Architecture, Design and Planning. Over the years he has oriented his research work towards the interactions between design and digital technology, exploring various research fields such as 3D modeling and design visualization, heritage valorization, the exploration of new languages for making information accessible, through visual design. In 2013 he organized and hosted the first edition of the international design conference 2CO_COmmunicating Complexity. More recently, in his research laboratory ‘animazionedesign’, he started exploring ways to develop a design approach aware of the local dimension, working abroad, in Morocco and Palestine, and in Sardinia, with a major research project at the 2015 Expo, a project about the dissemination of his University's historic scientific museum, and a multimedia installation for the PastFuture exhibit at Milan's Triennale.

After organizating and chairing the second edition of the international design conference 2CO_COmmunicating Complexity, Tenerife, Canary islands, Spain, November 2017, Nicolò is currently engaged in a new exciting project about visualizing the 'Statuti Sassaresi' a codex from the beginning of the 14th century

 
Ceccarelli