The Quilts of Gees Bend

The Quilts of Gee's Bend were created by a group of women who live in the isolated African-American hamlet of Gee's Bend, Alabama. "The compositions of these quilts contrast dramatically with the ordered regularity associated with many styles of Euro-American quiltmaking. There's a brilliant, improvisational range of approaches to composition that is more often associated with the inventiveness and power of the leading 20th-century abstract painters than it is with textile-making," writes Alvia Wardlaw, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts.

The quilting tradition in Gee's Bend goes back to the 19th century, when the community was the site of a cotton plantation owned by a Joseph Gee. Perhaps influenced in part by patterned African textiles, female slaves pieced together strips of cloth to make bedcovers. Throughout the post-bellum years and into the 20th century, Gee's Bend women made quilts to keep themselves and their children warm in unheated shacks that lacked running water, telephones and electricity. Along the way they developed a distinctive style, noted for its lively improvisations and geometric simplicity.

The quilts have been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

More than 50 quiltmakers currently make up the Gee's Bend Collective., which is owned and operated by the women of Gee’s Bend. Every quilt sold by the Gee’s Bend Quilt Collective is unique, individually produced, and authentic—each quilt is signed by the quilter and labeled with a serial number. Rennie Young Miller is the collective's president.

Books and other media

• The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, Tinwood Media
• Gee’s Bend: The Women and Their Quilts, Tinwood Media
• Documentary video on the Gee’s Bend quilters and a double-CD of Gee’s Bend Gospel Music from 1941 and 2002.

See also

• Harriet Powers
• African American art
• List of African-American visual artists