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Out of Necessity: Stitching Freedom, Stitching Art
Thirty-five Black women take their places at a row of tables just outside the second floor galleries of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. They are warm, charming, graceful. They come from a place few know or have seen. Yet, their presence evokes a universal spirituality and quiet wisdom that calms the soul.
The women are the quilters of Gee's Bend, and on this day, they have traded in their sewing needles for black writing pens. They are busy autographing coffee table books that explore their lives and the history of their quilts, which have been stitched in their rural Alabama community over the past eight decades.
The women are amazed that the quilts they made to keep their children warm in the winter are now the focus of one of the most popular gallery attractions in the nation. "The Quilts of Gee's Bend" exhibition is more than half way through an 11-city tour to museums around the country. The exhibit features 70 quilts hand made by the women of Gee's Bend, an isolated, region bordered on three sides by the Alabama River. Until recently the quilts were kept under beds and in closets. Now they are being praised by art critics as important works of modern American art.
Art collector William Arnett, who "discovered" the artists after seeing a picture of one of the quilts in Roland L. Freeman's 1996 book Communion of the Spirits: African American Quilters, Preservers and their Stories, describes the quilts as a "parallel visual component" to the kind of improvisation found in African American musical forms such as jazz and gospel.
According to Arnett, the quilts of Gee's Bend, are "a spectrum of a culture that has gone unnoticed, untapped and unduly not respected."
THE EARLY YEARS
There is a single dirt road into Gee's Bend. The community takes its name from Joseph Gee, a White planter from Halifax, N.C., who moved to the area in 1816 and named it after himself. He established a cotton plantation and upon his death in 1824, left the land and 47 Black slaves to two of his nephews.
In 1845, the Gees settled a $29,000 debt to cousin Mark H. Pettway by...