Transcript
A (0:20)
For over 150 years, a small, isolated township on a deep coast curve of the Alabama river in the American south has acted as an extraordinary incubator of the artistry and skills of a community of women working with textiles. The Gee's Bend quilters have redefined American art. Their quilts are colorful, fresh and utterly original. Each one tells its own own story as well as being embedded in the community from which it comes. When he first saw them in 2002, Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times said the quilts were some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced, adding, imagine Matisse and Clee. If you think I'm wildly exaggerating, see the show arising not from rarefied Europe but from the caramel soil of the rural south in the form of women descendants of slaves when Gees Bend was a plantation. Many of the quilts now live in the world's top art galleries. It puzzled the art establishment that the work of this hard scrabble community has had prefigured the lines and concepts of much of modern art. But now a new exhibition in Gees Bend itself offers us some clues. It tells the story of Dinah Miller, one of the earliest named quilt makers in Gee's Bend and the founder of a dynasty of fine quilters, five generations so far and counting. According to the story, passed down from daughter to granddaughter, Dinah arrived in America as a 13 year old in July 1860 aboard the last known slave ship ever to dock in US waters. The Clotilda smuggled 110 kidnapped West Africans illegally into the Mobile river a full 52 years after the trade in human beings had been outlawed. As one curator says, these people who endured the Middle Passage may have come with empty hands, but they did not come with empty heads. Among the gifts they brought were the strong artistic traditions, the sense of color and form that comes from West Africa's rich material culture. Interestingly, it is exactly the same tradition that influenced many of the modernist artists like Picasso, Matisse, Clique Braque, and Modigliani. So in some sense, the art critics had their question the wrong way around. The culture and artistic sensibilities that the Gees Bend quilt makers were drawing on belonged directly to them and their West African ancestors. And it is the European artists who borrowed from from that tradition, not the other way around. Welcome to Haptic and Hughes Tales of Textiles. I'm Jo Andrews, a hand weaver interested in what textiles tell us about ourselves and our communities, stories that go far beyond the written word. This episode is about the quilters of Gee's Bend and how they see their lives and their quilting in it. You can listen to Loretta Pettway Bennett, who is a direct descendant of Dinah Millers, her great great granddaughter. We also hear from Loretta's cousin, Mary Margaret Pattway.
B (4:57)
Well, it was cold down here. We didn't have a whole lot. I mean, you know, in the way of keeping your children warm and stuff like that, we didn't have a whole lot. So we took what we had and we made what we needed. If you needed a quilt on the bed, that's what you made. If you needed a quilt to hang to the windows. Cause those old houses were really raggedy, some of them, right? No insulations in the walls. And some of them were in such bad shape, you can actually look through the floor onto the ground. But yet. And still, you don't want your children to be cold, you know, so you made enough for the hang on the wall to spread on the floor to spread on the wall to hang over a window, plus the bed.