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Premiere: Kings of Pastry
Directed by Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker
Fri, Oct 29 5:00 PM Fri, Oct 29 7:00 PM Sat, Oct 30 1:00 PM Sat, Oct 30 7:00 PM Sun, Oct 31 1:00 PM
 more info
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The Quilts of Gee´s Bend
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On view Sunday, September 8 - Sunday, November 10, 2002 at the Audrey Jones Beck Building
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Lucy T. Pettway, "Drunkard´s Path" Variation (Snowball), c. 1950
The Collection of the Tinwood Alliance
The Quilts of Gee´s Bend features brilliant, bold, and dynamic quilts that are as much reminiscent of abstract paintings as of traditional American quilts. The group of women who created these quilts spans four generations of the isolated, all-black community of Gee´s Bend, Alabama.
The 70 quilts in the exhibition, created by 45 women, provide a fascinating look at the work of 20th-century artists who lived and worked in solitude. Gee´s Bend is located in southwest Alabama on a sliver of land five miles long and eight miles wide, a virtual island surrounded by a bend in the Alabama River. Without a ferry service for decades, the residents were confined by the river unless they made the hour-long drive to the county seat of Camden, directly across the river from Gee´s Bend.
The quilters´ use of motifs, techniques, and textiles endured and evolved over the course of the century. They were motivated to create the quilts by the need to keep their families warm, and they used rags and scraps of fabrics from their everyday lives—corduroy, denim, cotton sheets, and well-worn clothing. Like many American quilters, they transformed a necessity into a work of art—but their bold, innovative approach to design is unique.
The Quilts of Gee´s Bend is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The quilts in the exhibition are drawn from the collection of Tinwood Alliance, a nonprofit foundation for the support of African-American vernacular art. Through special conservation efforts, this exhibition makes these quilts accessible to American audiences for the first time and contributes to scholarship on the subject.
William Arnett, director of the Tinwood Alliance and publisher of Tinwood Press, discovered about five years ago this aspect of southern Alabama´s rich cultural heritage, part of which had remained stored under mattresses and in closets and cupboards for close to a century. He first traveled to the area in search of Annie Mae Young whose picture he had seen in a magazine, along with her quilt. She pointed him to Gee´s Bend, a community of about 750 named after Joseph Gee, the first white man to stake a claim there in the early 1800s. The Gee family sold the plantation to Mark Pettway in 1845. Most of the people who live in Gee´s Bend today are descendants of slaves on the former Pettway plantation. Their forebears continued to work the land as tenant farmers after emancipation, and many eventually bought the farms from the government in the 1940s. Isolated geographically, the women in the community created quilts from whatever materials were available, in patterns of their own imaginative design.
Gee´s Bend became known for its quilts, briefly, during the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s when the Freedom Quilting Bee was organized. Many quilters in the community represent second-generation quilting within a family. Today, quilting is a dying art in Gee´s Bend. No quilters are working on a regular basis, and Arnett only knows of one woman under 60 who makes more than one or two quilts a year.
A 20-minute video on the area of Gee´s Bend and its quilters accompanies the exhibition.
Following the premiere showing at the MFAH, the exhibition travels to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (November 21, 2002—March 9, 2003), the Mobile Museum of Art in Mobile, Alabama (June 16-August 31, 2003), the Milwaukee Art Museum (September 27, 2003 - January 4, 2004), The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (February 14-May 17, 2004), the Cleveland Museum of Art (June 27-September 12, 2004), the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia (Oct. 15, 2004 - January 2, 2005), the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (February 13-May 8, 2005), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (June 1-August 21, 2005), The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University (September 11-December 4, 2005), the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (March 25-June 18, 2006) and The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum (July 15 through December 31, 2006).
This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Tinwood Alliance, Atlanta.
Generous funding is provided by Caroline Wiess Law.
and
The Morgan Family
Sara and Bill
Mike and Chrissi
Catherine, Emma, and Will.
Major corporate sponsorship is provided by Pfaff Sewing Machines.
Additional support is provided by Linda and Ken Lay Family; The Oshman Foundation; Isla and Tommy Reckling; Ethel G. Carruth; Beth Robertson; and Anita and Gerald Smith.
Related Events:
Creation Station: Geometric Collages
At the Audrey Jones Beck Building
Sunday, September 29, 2002 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Creation Station: Bold Designs
At the Audrey Jones Beck Building
Sunday, September 22, 2002 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Drop-in Tour: The Quilts of Gee´s Bend
At the Audrey Jones Beck Building
Friday, October 4, 2002 10:00 AM
Friday, October 11, 2002 10:00 AM
Friday, October 18, 2002 10:00 AM
Friday, October 25, 2002 10:00 AM
Friday Afternoon Lecture
At the Caroline Wiess Law Building
Friday, September 13, 2002 1:30 PM
Friday, September 20, 2002 1:30 PM
Members Daytime Preview: The Quilts of Gee´s Bend
At the Caroline Wiess Law Building
Saturday, September 7, 2002 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Members Preview Party: The Quilts of Gee´s Bend
At the Caroline Wiess Law Building
Friday, September 6, 2002 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
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