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- [00:20]
A
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.
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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.
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A
That's Mary Margaret Pettway. And when she says we didn't have a whole lot, she means that in a way which would be hard for many of us to grasp. There are some good photographs of Gee's Ben taken in the 1930s, some of which I've posted in the show notes for this episode. At that time, people were living without running water or electricity in incredibly ramshackle log cabins. They used newsprint to line the walls. Things did change somewhat, but it's never been easy.
- [06:24]
B
I mean, it's what we're used to. We grew up poor, okay? A lot of people had gardens. A lot of people had hogs. A lot of people had cows. And if you had all three, you were batting a thousand. You were rich, okay? So it used to be if somebody killed a hog or a cow, everybody around the community would get some meat. You know, a little. Little thing of grease to cook with. You know, if somebody had a garden and you didn't have one, or something was growing in their garden that you didn't have, you can go to their garden or go to them and ask them for it, and they will give it to you.
- [07:05]
A
The families of Gee's Bend were subsistence farmers with their own animals and gardens. Some pay from picking cotton. Something that the whole community was involved in from early childhood. Here's Loretta Bennett, who's Mary Margaret's cousin.
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C
You know, you had to be in the field to pick the cotton. And that gonna be like from sunup to you know, almost sundown, time to get it all out of the field before the raining season come. Actually, even five years old and six years old, they didn't necessarily pick the cotton, but they may have to bring water to the ones that was out in doing the picking. So they would have to carry the water out and give you a drink of water, kind of. Everyone kind of had a share in it, even babies. Moms had to bring their babies. The babies may get pulled on the sack of the. You know, where you put the cotton inside as they was picking it.
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A
And if you wanted curtains for your home, covers for your bed, insulation on the walls, you had to make quilts. It's out of this necessity that the artistry and skill of the women of Gees Bend originates. Mary Margaret says they used anything and everything for quilts.
- [08:27]
B
They would use speed sacks and take time and rip them. And actually, if you rip it just right, you can save the thread so you can do what they call. Used to call whooping in a quip with it. And they use feed sacks, old pieces of sheet, old pants, old dresses, old shirts, you know, just whatever they can get their hands on.
- [08:53]
A
And here's one element in the originality of the Gees Bend quilts, the ability to make use of anything that comes to hand. The Pop art movement developed in the 1950s and 60s in the UK and the US with its rejection of museum art and its embrace of the ordinary and the commercial. But the women of Gees Bend had got there long before that, because they had to. Both Mary Margaret and Loretta are accomplished artists. Their quilts hang on the walls of museums and galleries around the world. They have no formal art education. But Gee's Bend was, in its own way, a tough school.
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B
Here's Mary Margaret in the 60s. We grew up under the quilt, which means if your mother had a quilt up, that's where you were, up under that quilt. So you can thread them needles and stick them back up through the quilt or hand them to them. Yeah, but we took naps under it, too. The old quilts, they spread an old quilt after they had the quilt set up, they spread a really old raggedy quilt up under there for the children to sit on and play with and practice their ABCs and stuff on. And. Yeah, so it literally means growing up. Well, you didn't grow up up under it, but, you know, being under the quilt when they were quilting it.
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And this was very much a family activity. Women did not quilt alone. They learned from each other and passed ideas amongst themselves as Loretta explains, that's.
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C
What you call a quilting bead. It might be like my mom, her mother, and some of my mom's grandmother, auntie, something like that. And what they would do, they would go to different houses and quilt the quilts up. You know, it just was maybe about. Maybe four to five women in a group. Well, I can. That I know of, go back to my great great grandmother, which her name was Dinah Miller. And so we can go back to that, you know, distant.
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A
There's a black and white picture taken in about 1900 of a woman who is undoubtedly related to Mary Margaret and Loretta. She's tending some quilts that are airing over a fence. The quilts in front of her are startling in their originality. In Gee's Bend, these were almost impromptu exhibitions. Everyone got a good look at your quilts as you add them and critically appraised them, gathering scraps of new ideas for themselves. This is one of the ways in which their artistry was valued and honed. And once girls emerged from the play den under the quilt, they found themselves two set to.
- [11:54]
C
I was about six years old, you know, just threading needles. And sometimes, like in the summer months when my mom and grandmother was piecing quilts, they have some little pieces that they may not want to use, and they, you know, they would let us practice on them. When I got about 12 or 13 years old one summer, I decided I was going to make this. This quilt. For some reason, I don't know why, but my mom had a lot of octagon shaped pieces already cut out. The quilt is called a flower garden. And I decided that I was gonna make this quilt and I made it. It took me all summer long. Someone on it every day, just about all day, you know, except for when I had to go do some chores around the house and it came out all crooked. My mom kind of straightened it up and she, you know, quilted it later. It made me feel really good. It was like I had something to do that summer.
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For Mary Margaret, it was a harder road.
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B
Quilting was like a punishment for me, I think. And I say that because I was made to learn to quilt. Quilt. You know, when you're a child, you want to go out and play with everybody else, but my mother wasn't having that. I don't care who's in the yard or came to play. If she wanted you to do your quilting, that's what you did.
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Both Mary Margaret and Loretta make original and lyrical work, but Loretta is clear that the traditions in which they quilt are drawn from their ancestors.
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C
Just looking at my mom's quilts and the other ladies quilts and just looking at the way that they used what they had and also looking at the clothing. Most of my quilts are repurposed clothing and so I like to use that and sometimes I just let it make themselves with a little music.
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A
So we have lots of elements that go to make up the skill and expertise shown in Gee's Bend. But there's still an extra magic there, a flame of creativity, something special in their understanding of design and colour that has allowed generations of women to produce astonishing work. Mary Margaret and Loretta have slightly different explanations for this. Here's Loretta.
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C
I think maybe because we was isolated in this little bend of the river, you know, one way in, one way out, so we were not exposed to any type of, like, artwork or a lot of television or anything like that. We had television, but you only got so many channels. We wanted something, I guess you could say, pretty, that we wanted to have on our beds or even hanging out on the wire to dry. It was our way of expressing our own individual creativity, I guess.
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For Mary Margaret, it's more of a.
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Puzzle, you know, I wish I could answer that question. I don't know, I mean, I look at some of the quilts and even some of the ones my mother did, and answering truthfully, I wondered what was going on in her mind. But I think they had an eye for what would be popular. A lot of quilts down here, they have that little piece of red in it or an odd color, you know, that's not like the other ones, even with denim, you know, you got dark denim, you got light denim, and denim shows the wear pattern in it and the wash pattern in it. But you've got that odd piece where it might be. Everything else might be old, really old, washed and softened denim. And then you might have a new piece or something that looks like a new piece where they may have taken a pocket off. And that piece is beautiful up under there. It's like new denim.
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Rainer Lampkins Fielder is the curator of the Soul's Grown Deep Foundation. It's dedicated to documenting, preserving and promoting the contributions of the African American artists of the American South Africa and the cultural traditions from which they grew. The words souls grown deep come from a wonderful poem written by Langston Hughes. Rayner believes that part of the explanation for the talent of Gee's Bend comes right out of the hardship and experience of discrimination.
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D
If you're going to do something, you do it for yourself and so that kind of spirit, and I think that's just part of the African American experience in general, allowed for the quilt makers in Gee's Bend to really go their own way, as they say, to do my way quilts, where it's like, okay, we might start on one. On one route, but let's see where it takes me. Let's see what I can create within these borders that is transformative and bigger than the borders themselves. You didn't have to play by a certain sort of rule, because the rules were not. The rules were only there, the larger kind of societal rules to hold you back. So where can you find your own sort of freedom and articulation of yourself within something that is about muting what you have to say? And so, you know, if you're a little bit more isolated, well, you can do what you want. And I think that is one of the things that kind of leads to that Gee's Bend style that is so captivating to the rest of us looking in on what is produced in that area, because it's like almost this tug and pull between a restriction of the border, but then all of the magistrate and improvisation and intention and story and biography and art that can occur within those. Those borders, we see that there's something different about it. We feel it, we sense it. That's one of the things that's so remarkable about these works.
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A
It took time for an understanding of what was happening in Gee's Bend to seep into the outside world. Rainer says it was a slow burn over many decades for the quilters to be appreciated.
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D
Well, it's interesting because I think that there have been many sort of sudden moments when people refocus their lens and maybe expand where they're looking to see some of the amazing work that's being made in the United States and in the South. I would say, probably the time that is often noted as being that moment when people really saw what was going on in the community was in 1937, where photographer Arthur Rothstein was basically taking survey photos of tenant farmers in Boykin, Alabama. And Gee's Bend is within Boykin, Alabama. And from that, we saw women quilting in their homes, and we also saw some of the quilts that were being aired outside. So it became this kind of unexpected exhibition of the work that was being created in these domestic spaces, that then being outside, hanging on lines to be aired, naturally.
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A
And then after that, nearly 30 years later, some of the artists of Gee's Bend became involved in the civil rights movement and set up a Freedom quilting.
- [19:55]
D
Bee in 1965, again in Gee's Bend, Alabama. This was another moment when people began to see and hear about what the quilt makers were doing then. And also, just to give a little bit of context, the quilts really have a history, particularly at that time, that was deeply rooted in the civil rights movement in Alabama. The Freedom Quilt Quilting Bee Cooperative was established in 1965, and this was established by two quilt makers. And this was a way of sort of transforming the economy of the area. They understood that the quilt that they were producing and also their sewing skills could be used outside of the bend.
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A
Their involvement in the civil rights movement and its impact on their lives was profound in many ways. It's also extraordinary that even their political involvement was expressed through textiles. Here's Rainer.
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D
For African Americans, you know, there's never been a revelation of injustice. That has been a sort of constant state. I think it was, though, in the 60s, when one could become more politically active, when it was a little bit easier to do so. Still a challenge. Still a challenge now, but certainly still a challenge in the south at that time. I think with that combination of demanding larger civic rights, voter rights, equal pay opportunity, that one then looks at what one has that can be used for political gains, that can be used for just opening up a community and diversifying what is possible for a community. I think that was that point where the Freedom Quilting Bee was able to use what they had for a greater good. Whether that greater good is trying to find some sort of economic equality or to at least improve economic situations, to also promote one's voice and to show that there is something quite unique in this area.
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A
But the explosion of public interest in their work had to wait until the early 2000s. By this time, a collector and supporter of African American art, William Arnett, had arrived in Gee's Bend and started paying better prices for the quilts. And then finally, in 2002, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, and the Whitney Museum in New York showed the first exhibitions of work from Gee's Bend. And the critics raved. But at first, it was a puzzling experience for the artists, as Loretta explains.
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C
When I saw him in Houston for the very first time, you know, hanging in a museum, it was just. It was just so mind blowing. You know, the quilts that we thought was so ugly and just was used for necessity, you know, just to be laying down on or just to be covering a window or floor to keep the air out. And now you see those very same quilts that you Laid on, hanging in a museum that is so. Oh, it is so, so powerful. It brought tears to our eyes.
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And then other museums followed suit. Even the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York held an exhibition, and the women of Gee's Bend went to see it.
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C
At first, we all was like, I don't know what they see. But as each museum went on and on, you know, we went to different museums. Some of us still didn't see what they saw. But it began to dawn on me that these quilts are very beautiful. These quilts are our art. You know, even though we didn't, we had no idea what art was because we were so isolated. But some of us younger ones got it. Some of the older one that has passed on, they still did not. They didn't comprehend how beautiful the quilt was.
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A
The first time Mary Margaret ever went to a museum was to see the Gee's Bend quilts at the Met in New York. She found it an overwhelming experience.
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I myself was so excited because all those old quilts, the ones that were under the mattresses and packed back on a shelf in somebody's room, they looked beautiful. Hanging up on those sterling white walls, those quilts looked like they were just the most prettiest things in the world. And my mother has one at the Met, and I saw it. I said, mmm. And I forgot I was in company, you know what I mean? So I said, I used to sleep under that old thing now. You know what I'm saying? I didn't intend to say it aloud, but it came out, and everybody was looking at me like I'm going crazy.
- [25:29]
A
To me, the quilts have the elegance and emotional power of blues music, which also originates in the African American experience in the Deep south and draws its traditions from work, songs and spirituals. And just as the blues have brought us something new and profound, so too has the work of the artists of Gee's Bend.
- [25:54]
D
If life is really challenging for anyone, regardless of where your position ultimately is, you know, so that's just kind of part of how the system is just not so great and upholds and empowers one group to the detriment of another. But that doesn't mean that that is what entirely defines that person or that area or that group. That's just a part of the context. But what's being created, where their voices really reside is what they are sharing with us in the works that they create, in the choices that they make, in the stories about themselves or labor or their family that are articulated in these works that are incredibly Thoughtful.
- [26:48]
A
Both Mary Margaret and Loretta still live in Gee's Bend. But despite the acclaim they've received, they fight shy of being called artists. And that's partly a reflection of how hard it has been for women, and in particular women of colour, to claim this space and this title when it has shut them out comprehensively. Loretta says it takes a bit to get your head round it.
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C
Yes, it is weird because I don't see myself as being an artist. I still see myself as making, being a quilt maker.
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The quilts and the quilters themselves have brought Gee's Bend acclaim and, as Mary Margaret says, a level of financial security.
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B
It gives us options, I would say, in saying that if you're lucky enough to sell a quilt, then you don't have to decide, well, I can just pay this month on my bills. You know, pretty much everybody's in debt. You know, some of those debts you can actually pay off. You can get your house fixed, you can get a car or do a down payment on a car or truck. It is meaning freedom, basically.
- [28:12]
A
At the soul's grown deep foundation. Rainer Lampkins Fielder believes the quilters of Gee's Bend have broadened our perception of art. And Rainer has her own explanation of why the artist quilt makers are unique.
- [28:28]
D
Quilt making and the reuse of materials in various ways, one finds this in many communities. But in G's Bend, it became part of the way of looking and being, of interacting, of communicating with each other. Because there's been such a long standing tradition of the transmission of quilting techniques for over 100 years. That's something that is unique to that place. Sometimes you don't know exactly what's in the water in places. It's very difficult for me to think of another artistic community or creative community that continues to this day to make work of this quality and with an intention of doing something perhaps a little bit different.
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A
Mary Margaret and Loretta are both active quilt makers, extending and growing their experience and incorporating new ideas. But beyond that, they both say that the quilting brings them something special. Here's Mary Margaret.
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B
I am at what they call perfect peace. If I've got background noise like a TV or a radio, and I'm warm, sometimes my children will actually feed me. And I'm at perfect peace. I can do it all day just sitting there. And that is a quality of life that is so very hard to find now.
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A
And for Loretta, it's a way of centering her in her own community and family.
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C
You know, I kind of go back to the time when my great great grandparents when they was making quilts. I don't know how you would say I kind of feel like they are with me when I'm doing my sewing, making my quilts and stuff. I can feel like they are there with me.
- [30:36]
A
And one of the ancestors Loretta has had very much in her mind is her great great grandmother Dininah Miller, the 13 year old who arrived all those years ago and who played such an important role in creating an artistic dynasty in Gees Bend. I've posted details of the exhibition In Gees Bend, some historic images and more information about the Voyage of the Clotilda on the webpage for this episode, which you can find at www.hapticandhew.com listen Haptic and Hu is hosted by me, Jo Andrews. It's edited and produced by Bill Taylor and sound edited by Charles Lomas of Darkroom Productions. It's an independent podcast free of ads and sponsorship, supported entirely by its listeners who generously fund us through Buy Me a Coffee or by becoming a friend of Haptic and Hugh in this month's Friends, which goes out in two weeks time, we'll be Unlocking the Secrets of the Ice Climate change means that many glaciers are shrinking and beginning to release ancient textiles that have lain frozen within them for thousands of years. Snowshoes for ponies, quartz arrows bound with string and a complete Roman tunic are just some of the finds that have melted out of the ice. To find out more about friends, go to www.hapticandhue.com join thanks for listening and I'll leave you this time with the last verse of the poem by Langston Hughes, from which the name of the soul's grown deep foundation is drawn. Hughes was a major figure in the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s, in which many black intellectuals and artists flourish. It's read here by Bill Taylor. I've known rivers I have known rivers ancient as the world, and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muzzy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers, ancient dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the R.
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Sat.