Honoring Craft.....the 2015 National Heritage Fellowship Award

First, I apologize for my absence, while my mother passed away at 95.

But today I honor her history in my love of the art of quilting.   Recently three quilters from Gee’s Bend Alabama were awarded the National Heritage Fellowship Award, our nation’s highest honor for folk and traditional arts.…….Mary Lee Bendolph, Loretta Pettway, and Lucy Mingo.

The Quilts of Gee’s Bends are a collection of quilts created by a group of African American women and their ancestors who lived in the rural isolated area of Gee’s Bend, southeast of Selma along the Alabama River.  These works of arts are considered to be one of the most unique and important African American contribution to the history of art within the United States.

Gee’s Bend, officially called Boykin, is named after Joseph Gee, a landowner that moved from North Carolina in 1816 to establish a cotton plantation with his seventeen slaves.  Mark H. Pettway bought the plantation from Gee in 1845, and Pettway remains a prominent name throughout the community today.  After emancipation many of the freed slaves stayed as sharecroppers.  Their quilts were made out of necessity, using scrap fabrics to make bed-coverings to keep their families warm in unheated shacks, without running water, electricity or phones.

Most quilters came to know of Gee’s Bend after well-known African American textile collector-historian-curator William Arnett introduced their bold, abstract and improvisational style in museums throughout the US, including The Whitney, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Art Houston to name a few.  After stumbling across these amazingly simple quilts in the late 1960’s, Arnett introduced them to the NYC art community and as they say, the rest is history.  Their simple, intuitive style laid the foundation inspiring art quilters today to create many wonderful abstract quilts, all rooted in the wonderful traditions of Gee’s Bend Quilts. To learn more about Arnett’s foundation, or the NEA and its award, or see many of the wonderful Gee's Bend quilts visit:

http://soulsgrowndeep.org/

http://arts.gov/

http://www.auburn.edu/academic/other/geesbend/explore/catalog/slideshow/