The quilts on display were made between 1930 and 2000. Collector William Arnett happened on them in 1998, when he saw a photo of a Gee's Bend quilt in a book about African-American quilting. This isn't the first time Gee's Bend has garnered national attention; identified as one of the most impoverished communities in America during the Depression, it got both federal funds and media attention.
In the 1960s, Gee's Benders were in the news again, when, after some of them protested for voting rights with Martin Luther King Jr., ferry service to the community was cut off. In 1975, Irene Williams made a quilt striped with red, white, and blue banners reading ''Vote" to mark the struggle.
These quilts have a jaw-dropping correspondence to modern art, even though the artists knew nothing of Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, or Robert Rauschenberg. Some pieces here look like sister-works to paintings and collages made by those artists. The quilts are defined by bold geometric forms; patterns that range from notably minimalist to a Paul Klee-like shimmer; and a nuanced, risk-taking color sense. A 1975 quilt made from scraps of corduroy by China Pettway looks like a Mondrian in shades of brown.
Well-known African-American artists of the midcentury, such as Jacob Lawrence and John Biggers, made narrative art about the black experience. They were shunted aside by an art world obsessed with abstraction. It's a strange irony that the work of the Gee's Benders, black women so poor they lined their walls with newspaper for decoration, might well have caught the eye of uber critic Clement Greenberg.
Jane Livingston, in her catalog essay for the show, which originated at Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, points to certain design elements, particularly the lively use of color, as perhaps making their way from Africa through several generations. Then there are traditional patterns, such as the Log Cabin and the Pinwheel, that some of these artists use as a launching pad. These, and not modern art, are the seeds of their work.
