ArmenPress
March 21 2005

THE QUILTS OF GEE’S BEND PRESENTED IN ARMENIA

YEREVAN, MARCH 19, ARMENPRESS: The U.S. Embassy in Armenia
presented last Friday “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” exhibition of twelve
quilts created by a community of African-American women in Gee’s
Bend, Alabama. This exhibition has been shown with international
acclaim at major art museums across the United States, and is
appearing overseas for the first time. Ambassador John Evans
officially opened the exhibition at the Academia Gallery in Yerevan.
Gee’s Bend is a small rural community located in southwest Alabama
on a sliver of land five miles long and eight miles wide, an island
surrounded by a bend in the Alabama River. Gee’s Bend was the site of
cotton plantations, owned by the families of Joseph Gee and Mark
Pettway, and were worked by slave labor. Most of the approximately
750 people who live in Gee’s Bend today are descendants of slaves.
After the Civil War, when slavery was abolished, the freed slaves
rented the land from the Pettways, took their family name, and
founded an all-black community that was very isolated from the
surrounding world.
Throughout American history, quilting has provided generations of
women with an outlet to express their creativity and skill. A quilt
is a layered blanket, with a front and a back, and stuffing in the
middle for extra warmth. Though traditions of quilting span many
centuries, civilizations and cultures, “pieced” quilts, which have
tops decorated with strips of cloth in a range of colors and fabrics,
originated in colonial America.
In 2002, the first exhibition of these quilt masterpieces was
organized at the Museum of Fine Arts, Atlanta. The “Quilts of Gee’s
Bend” also traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New
York, as well as other museums in a twelve-city U.S. tour. The
exhibition achieved tremendous international acclaim. Hundreds of
print and broadcast media organizations that have celebrated the
quilts and the history of Gee’s Bend. Art critics worldwide have
compared the quilts to the works Henri Matisse and Paul Klee.
In 2003, with assistance from Tinwood organizations, all the
living quilters of Gee’s Bend – more than fifty women – founded the
Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective to exhibit, market and sell the quilts
being produced by the women of the Bend. In 2005 the Quilts of Gee’s
Bend will travel overseas for the first time, to be exhibited in
Armenia, Georgia, and Kazakhstan.