Five years ago, few people had heard of the Gee’s Bend quilts. Now, the bold geometric designs of this art world phenomenon have splashed their way across the country’s museums, onto postage stamps, into home décor product lines and the realm of national iconography.
Saturday, the quilts arrive in Tacoma: 70 originals made by black women in the tiny town of Gee’s Bend, 30 miles southwest of Selma in southwest Alabama.
Following the huge success of the first show in 2002 “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” which didn’t tour the Northwest, comes “Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt.” Tacoma Art Museum
is the only West Coast venue.
“The Gee’s Bend exhibition is very strong graphically, which pairs dynamically with the photographic and painting exhibitions also currently running,” said TAM director Stephanie Stebich of the decision to bring the show to Tacoma. “It’s a very accessible medium for audiences, and there’s a strong historical story. Artistically, it’s a great moment for quilts. The art market has gotten more inclusive in its understanding of the full range of visual expression.”
Tosha Grantham, who curated the quilts exhibit at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore where it attracted record crowds, spoke to the significance of the quilts in a broadening contemporary art scene. “The art world is beginning to identify nontraditional art, which was formerly in the craft world, as part of contemporary art.
“And it’s popular for many reasons: Because it’s such a triumphant story, the quilts are really technically interesting and unique, and the energy is obvious,” Grantham said. “It appeals to a younger, more diverse audience, and that’s exciting.”
Gwen Maxwell-Williams is a Redmond quilter of 12 years whose work is in TAM’s exhibit “Threads That Bind: Works by Pacific Northwest African American Quilters,” following the Gee’s Bend show. She’s seen the Gee’s Bend quilts and is impressed.
“They’ve covered all the elements of design without knowing them: form, repetition of shape, patterns,” she said.
Yet as recent events have uncovered, the rags-to-riches story of the isolated Alabama quilt artists passing traditions down from slavery times to modern-art stardom isn’t clear-cut anymore. Last spring, three of the Gee’s Bend quilters filed lawsuits against the family of Atlanta art dealers who made them famous. The legal accusations have caused a division among the formerly close-knit quilters, between the plaintiffs and those who disagree with them.
The repercussions for the TAM show are minimal: With no action on the legal issues yet, the show goes on, including four Gee’s Bend quilters visiting Tacoma in late September. Stebich is neutral, stating that the museum is interested only in the artistic issues. But the legal dispute around the quilts does raise questions. When art is “discovered” and represented, who takes the credit? When art is community-based, how much profit should each individual receive? And is the thriving industry of art-spawned tchotchkes an insult to the artist’s integrity, or valuable income?
FROM BEDS TO MUSEUMS
Women have been quilting in Gee’s Bend since Dinah Miller arrived on an African slave ship in the mid-1800s to work on Mark H. Pettway’s cotton plantation, according to Miller’s great-granddaughter Arlonzia Pettway. For six generations, living family members say, Miller’s descendants handed down stories and quilt-making arts from mother to daughter, weaving a tactile fabric of history and community. Quilts were made, used, given as gifts, even burned to chase away mosquitoes, recounts art scholar Amei Wallach in the exhibition’s catalog.
The connection is palpable: Miller’s great-granddaughter Arlonzia Pettway, 83, great-great-granddaughter Loretta Pettway Bennett, 45, and great-great-great-granddaughter Andrea Pettway Williams, 35, all have quilts in the upcoming TAM show. Over the years, the stylistic traditions have both continued and broadened, the irregularly geometric quilt-pieces of old clothes keep their bold, abstract patterns while tracing an increasing independence with color and fabric.
Created in the tiny, all-black hamlet isolated by three bends in the Alabama River, the quilts stayed mostly in Gee’s Bend. Fame in the ’60s from the civil rights movement-inspired Freedom Quilting Bee was soon lost as city art folk moved on to other trends. So when William Arnett, a white Atlanta art dealer known for preserving Southern folk art, visited the area in the late 1990s with his sons Matt and Paul, they found an art form that was dying out.
“The older quilters were getting frail, the younger ones were moving away and weren’t interested in it – it takes too much patience and time,” remembered Matt Arnett. “And with the advent of Wal-Mart, the necessity to make them was gone.”
Enthused by the extraordinary patterns, the Arnetts returned many times to buy quilts. In 2002, under their business name Tinwood Alliance, they collaborated with the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston to curate the exhibition “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend.” Critics were skeptical – The Wall Street Journal called them “beaux-arts blankies” – and attendance was mediocre. Yet after other critics hailed the subsequent Whitney Museum opening in New York as modern-day Matisse, the fervor ignited.
The show booked 10 more venues through late 2006, model Kathy Ireland purchased reproduction rights from the quilters for her home décor line, a U.S. postage stamp was commissioned. In 2006, Tinwood and the Houston museum organized their second exhibition, with seven museum stops, including Tacoma.
In less than a decade, the quilts of Gee’s Bend had gone from unknown to iconic, and the result, say both the Arnetts and the quilters themselves, was a renaissance of the art form.
“The women now felt they weren’t making these things in isolation,” said Matt Arnett. “They got back to work, the younger generation took interest again. Louisiana Bendolph and Loretta Bennett are now making some of the most interesting work that’s ever been made in Gee’s Bend.”
“It really was dying out,” agreed Mary Lee Bendolph. The Arnetts “brought it back up to life by coming here and buying those quilts.” Even men and boys are getting into the act, she said.
The quilts also started selling for much more than the few hundred dollars the Arnetts paid for their initial purchases (most of which they still, in fact, own). A quilt by Annie Mae Young, purchased by the Seattle Art Museum in 2005, has a reported price tag of $20,000, though SAM officials decline to confirmed. At a 2006 show at Seattle’s Greg Kucera Gallery, the quilt prices ranged from $12,000 to $22,000. All of the quilts in the Tacoma exhibition belong to the Arnetts and aren’t for sale. And, with the many quilt-inspired items, books and DVDs, the income potential of the Gee’s Bend quilts started growing. And this is where the rub lies.
WHO GETS CREDIT?
In April, Annie Mae Young sued the Arnetts for selling her quilts without payment or proper accounting for sales and licensing her designs without her permission. A few months later, quilters Loretta Pettway and Lucinda Pettway Franklin also filed suit, the former saying the Arnetts tricked her into signing away her copyright, and the latter alleging they borrowed family quilts without returning them. No court dates have been set.
Tinwood is confident that it has acted in the quilters’ best interests, said spokeswoman Dindy Yokel, who insists that the corporation has run at a loss in the promotion of the Gee’s Bend quilts. “Once all the facts are brought out into the open, the lawsuits will be seen to be unfounded,” she said.
Annie Mae Young, Loretta Pettway and Lucinda Pettway Franklin declined to comment on their lawsuits.
And, the rancor hasn’t affected the exhibition’s popularity. At the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where the show just closed, attendance figures hit 22,945, the highest for an entire year.
But it has affected the community and the quilters in Gee’s Bend. In 2003-04, the Arnetts helped the Gee’s Bend women organize themselves into a 40-woman collective, to which both quilt profits and product royalties would be paid, and from which a dividend would be given to each member. This recognized the interdependent nature of the tradition and protected senior quilters who could no longer sew, said the collective’s manager Mary Ann Pettway.
Yet despite big price tags and ubiquitous quilt-decorated products, the average dividend is $15,000, a sum divided among the 40 collective members “about three or four times a year,” said Mary Ann Pettway, who is distantly related to plaintiff Loretta Pettway. (The last name is a common one in the Alabama area.) The money has helped some members make small improvements to their homes. But in the opinion of Pettway and several other quilters, it hasn’t affected the general quality of life in Gee’s Bend, where the average per capita income in 2000 was less than $17,000.
A COMMUNITY DIVIDED
All three plaintiffs have dropped out of the collective. Other quilters, however, stand by the Arnetts and are critical of the lawsuits.
“I don’t agree with it,” said Mary Ann Pettway. “I feel like I’ve been treated fairly.”
Louisiana Bendolph, whose work is in the TAM exhibition and who is one of the four quilters visiting the museum on Sept. 30, agreed. “I still believe in the Arnetts and the good they’ve done for Gee’s Bend. … If there had been one or two or three artists, we could have been rich. But the money is shared between the women. And what they’ve done for us.
“If we wouldn’t have had them, we wouldn’t be where we are. But here we are: Now we’re major artists,” Bendolph added. “We get to go to schools, get to talk about ourselves. There’s the Gee’s Bend postage stamp, and we were honored in Montgomery for our legacy. There’s that book about the women of Gee’s Bend. … How can you put a value on that? I feel like we haven’t paid them enough.”
Matt Arnett maintains that all quilts in each show have been paid for by Tinwood to either the collective or the quilters themselves. Tinwood is donating its share of the $15,000 fee from the current exhibition to the collective.
“For some of the women of Gee’s Bend to turn around and do what they did, it hurts,” Bendolph said. “It was pulling our community together, and for greed to come in and try to destroy something that was so great. … It wasn’t just about us. It affects the world.”
FROM ART TO TCHOTCHKES
The Gee’s Bend phenomenon begs the question of what effect the commercialization spotlight has on folk art: Does it devalue, or is it a welcome added income?
“I don’t think it does the art a disservice,” said Alvia Wardlow, co-curator of both Gee’s Bend quilt exhibitions at the Houston museum. “When you see Van Gogh lunchboxes or jewelry, it’s the same thing: People love it so much, and they can’t have the original, so it’s just a nice thing to take home. It makes the work even more iconic. It’s a way of having these women as part of your life.”
And the royalties add income. As Mary Ann Pettway points out, most of the collective’s sales are actually books and DVDs, not quilts.
Has success changed the art of the Gee’s Bend quilt?
“Not really,” said Loretta Bennett. “Just the times are more modern, we see things different and get out more. The younger generation are putting a bit more of a twist to (the quilts), a little bit more oomph.”
One of those twists is a recent collaboration with master printers to transfer sampler quilts to etching plates and then to prints. The results are on display at the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle.
But, says Bennett, the quilts are still quilts. “I have mine thrown on my bed, and my son has one that I made him on his bed, year-round, instead of comforters.”
Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568
rosemary.ponnekanti@ thenewstribune.com
What: “Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt”
When: Saturday through Dec. 9
Where: Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma
HOURS: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. third Thursdays, noon-5 p.m. Sundays
Admission: $25 family, $7.50 general, $6.50 students and seniors, ages 5 and younger and third Thursdays free
Related Events
• “If These Quilts Could Talk,” 2 p.m. Sept. 23: A community conversation led by Tacoma writer Rosalind Bell; museum admission free to visitors with a quilt and a story to tell.
• “A Conversation with the Quilters of Gee’s Bend,” 2 p.m. Sept. 30: Four quilters from the Alabama hamlet will talk about their quilts and their community; cost, $5 museum members, $15 nonmembers including museum admission; includes performance of hymns by Allen AME Church’s music department members following the program.
• “Deep South: Freedom Quilting,” 2 p.m. Nov. 10: A discussion by Michael Honey, a University of Washington Tacoma professor and writer, with opening performance of spirituals by the St. John Baptist Gospel Choir; free with museum admission.
Following Gee’s Bend exhibit: “Threads That Bind: Works by Pacific Northwest African American Quilters,” Dec. 18-Feb. 17
Information: 253-272-4258, www.tacomaartmuseum.org
What: Prints by Gee’s Bend quilters Loretta Bennett, Mary Lee Bendolph and Louisiana Bendolph
Who: Greg Kucera Gallery, 212 Third Ave. S., Seattle
When: 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays through Oct. 31
Admission: Free
Related Events: Reception and book-signing for the Gee’s Bend quilters, noon Sept. 29
Information: 206-624-0770, www.gregkucera.com By The Numbers: Gee’s Bend, Ala.
Population: 750 (nearly all black)
Stores: 1
Schools: 0
Day cares: 0
Churches: 2
Driving time to nearest post office, bank and doctor: 1 hour
School bus pickup time: 6 a.m.
County unemployment rate: 7.9 percent
Average price of each top-selling quilt: $20,000
Per capita income for county: $16,996
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