Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum

Chapter 5. Back to the Future:The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, 2002

 back to the fUtUre The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, 00 ChApTER 5 transgressing normalized boundariesof gender, class, race, and elitist investments in high versus low art, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend wasboundtobeoneofthemosttalkedaboutexhibitionsinAmerican museum history. The exhibition featured seventy-one quilts made between 1930 and 1997 by forty-four women from the rural and isolated community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama.1 The show premiered in 2002 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, before traveling for nearly six years to twelve other major American art museums on the East Coast and in the Midwest, West, and South (plate 14).2 This serious validation of Black women’s quilts by the mainstream art world was unprecedented. The transformation of the quilts from personal utilitarian objects to works of art proved to be an extraordinary challenge to some visitors and critics, although among the thousands of viewers, many of whom stood in long lines to see the quilts, the exhibition was deemed a compelling success.3 The making of quilts in America dates back to the British colonial immigrants of the eighteenth century. They have long been a part of American homes for warmth, individual expression, and storytelling in the seemingly endless improvisation of design, pattern, fabric, stitching, and embroidery. Although fans and collectors of quilts would not dispute their value as beautiful treasures, like many objects that have been relegated as “women’s work” in the domestic sphere, quilts have largely been ignored by art museums until chaPter 5  recently in their history. The first serious exhibition of American quilts by a major American art museum was Abstract Design in American Quilts, curated in 1971 by quilt scholar Jonathan Holstein at the Whitney Museum of American Art. And in the last ten years, quilts have appeared in American art museums with greater frequency. In this period, no other quilts have received as much attention in American art museums as the quilts of Gee’s Bend.4 The quilts have become a cultural phenomenon as a result of their exhibition . The quilts and their merchandising are remarkable. Beginning in 2002, catalogues, postcards, and calendars featuring the quilts were publishedandties ,scarves,magnets,andmugsweremanufactured.Inthesame year, Tinwood Media released the Gee’s Bend Singers’ debut double CD called How We Get Over: Sacred Songs of Gee’s Bend (2002), which consists ofrecordingsmadein1941and2002.5 But,there’smore.In2003theclothing store Anthroplogie began selling reproductions of the quilts. In 2004, a former model turned entrepreneur, Kathy Ireland, launched products in her Gee’s Bend Design Solution home furnishing line that transformed Gee’s Bend quilt designs into rugs and lamps. In the summer of 2006, the United States Postal Service released the Quilts of Gee’s Bend postage stamps, featuring ten quilts created between 1940 and 2001. The stamps were released at the largest annual philatelic event in the nation, and were the sixth release in the postal service’s prestigious American Treasures Series established “to showcase beautiful works of American fine art and crafts.”6 In 2010, the home accessories retailer Pottery Barn included Gee’s Bend quilt designs in its “Museum Craft Collection” created in collaboration with the American Folk Art Museum in New York and the Gee’s Bend Collective. In addition to the merchandising impact of the quilts, their exhibitions have inspired writers to create stories based on the quilts, the women, and their hometown. In 2007, playwright Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder debuted her critically acclaimed play Gee’s Bend in Atlanta, and it has since toured nationwide.InApril2008,RepublicanpresidentialcandidateJohnMcCain visited the women on his “Straight Talk” campaign tour. Also in 2008, author Patricia C. McKissak published her children’s book Stitchin’ and Pullin’: A Gee’s Bend Quilt with illustrations by Cozbi A. Cabrera. In 2010, Irene Lathan published her novel Leaving Gee’s Bend, which chronicles the story of a young Black girl in Gee’s Bend named Ludelphia Bennett who travels to get help for her sick mother in 1932. The exhibitions, the quilters , and the story of Gee’s Bend have been met with popular enthusiasm 7 back to the fUtUre across the country from individuals, institutions, and even the federal government. Critical response to the quilts’ first art museum exhibition, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, was controversial because of the unusual attention given to quilts, objects not originally made to function as artwork, by prestigious art institutions. The quilts were hung on the gallery...