STYLE

Art that binds

Quilts from isolated Alabama town bring time-honored craft to modern prominence and alter perceptions along the way

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Wednesday, September 06, 2006

First they were derided as folksy kitsch, then embraced by millions as fine works of art.

In the past four years, the bold, geometric quilts created by African American women from tiny, rural Gee's Bend, Ala., made a journey — real and philosophical — further than many people, especially their makers, ever imagined.

Indeed, days before "The Quilts of Gee's Bend" opened at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in September 2002, a headline in the Wall Street Journal sniffed, "Museums Cozy Up to Quilts: It's High Season for Blankets, But Patrons Ask, 'Is It Art?' " The article dismissed the hand-sewn quilts as "beaux-arts blankies," charged the museum with lowering its artistic standards and quoted one arts professional as decreeing "No more quilts!"

The exhibit — which featured dozens of the unusually abstract quilts, some dating to the 1930s — received scant attention from local media, which mostly lumped the story into their house and garden coverage.

But some who saw the exhibit appreciated the quilts as much more than mere decorative household items or even the exotic products of an "outsider" community. After all, these were as different from the flowery pastel-colored quilts of Americana as the modernist art of Henri Matisse.

One of the admirers was Austin Museum of Art director Dana Friis-Hansen. "It was simply some of the most exciting and impressive art I had seen in years," said Friis-Hansen. "It made me think anew about all my notion of where great art could and should be in the 21st century."

The Houston exhibit piqued his interest to such an extent that he decided to bring some of this exciting art to Austin. The result is "Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee's Bend Quilts, and Beyond," an exhibit at the Austin Museum of Art-Downtown, organized in conjunction with Tinwood Alliance, an Atlanta-based nonprofit promoter for vernacular artists. (The alliance was co-founded by collector William Arnett and Jane Fonda, both early promoters of Gee's Bend quilters.)

The Austin show features the work of 70-year-old master quilt maker Mary Lee Bendolph and those she influenced, along with art by fellow Alabama artists Thornton Dial and Lonnie Holley, whose expressive sculptures make use of found objects. The pieces include Dial's homage to Bendolph, "Mrs. Bendolph," an undulating grid of clothing scraps mounted on a wood panel and layered with paint. The exhibit and catalog will travel nationally.

Friis-Hansen wasn't alone in his enthusiasm for the distinctive geometric abstractions crafted mostly from scrap fabric. When the Houston show traveled to New York's Whitney Museum of American Art (at the time, its only scheduled tour stop), critics for Newsweek and The New York Times raved about the quilts, declaring them "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced." Eleven more museums quickly added the exhibit to their calendars; the show is currently on view at Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.

Bendolph and other quilt-makers suddenly found themselves new stars in the art world firmament and were sought after for radio and television interviews. Some of the quilters dined with first lady Laura Bush. Postcards, posters, coasters, magnets, calendars and other gift-shop merchandise emblazoned with Gee's Bend quilts filled museum stores. Retailers launched reproduction quilts and rugs. And just last month the U.S. Postal Service issued commemorative postage stamps featuring Gee's Bend quilts.

All that hoopla is a long way from the tiny town of Gee's Bend, surrounded on three sides by an oxbow of the meandering Alabama River. Only one long strip of roadway (not paved until 1967) connects the isolated community to the rest of the world.

Founded in antebellum times, Gee's Bend was originally a cotton plantation belonging to Joseph Gee and his relative Mark Pettway, who bought the Gee estate in 1850. After the Civil War, the freed slaves became tenant farmers for the Pettway family. Because of the difficult topography, they remained cut off from the surrounding world, but still subject to the Deep South's racism, Jim Crow laws and the punishing poverty of tenant farming.

After now-famous images by Farm Security Administration photographer Arthur Rothstein appeared during the Great Depression, the community earned a strange renown as an "Alabama Africa." Subsequently, the federal government purchased land and homes for the "Benders," as residents are called. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Gee's Bend in 1965 and Benders joined in local civil rights protests.

At the same time, the area's agricultural economy was in its death throes. Younger people left for jobs in the cities.

Yet, from its earliest days and throughout the decades the town's women continued to quilt, piecing together scraps from worn-out work clothes and using leftover cotton retrieved from the fields or the cotton gin floor for batting. First and foremost, quilts were a winter necessity in the drafty, uninsulated plank-and-mud houses: Piled on beds or draped on walls to keep out drafts, dozens might be used in each home.

After long days in the field, the women of Gee's Bend had little time for fussy designs. But over generations, they developed a bold and sophisticated style marked by jazzy geometries and syncopated colors. Critics have noted the stylistic similarities not only with modern art but with vivid, traditional African textiles. (In fact, the San Francisco exhibit of Gee's Bend quilts is paired with patterned textiles from West Africa.)

Beginning in the 1980s a few art collectors found their way to Gee's Bend. By the mid-1990s, Arnett and his Tinwood Alliance had discovered the tiny town, and the rest is art-world history.

"I think of these quilts as cutting-edge art," says Friis-Hansen, explaining that he means "cutting-edge" in the most literal sense as something that breaks boundaries. "These quilts and their creators are literally in our time and right under our noses widening the definition of art."

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699