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Gee's Bend modern: the isolated Alabama community of Gee's Bend has long nurtured a quilting tradition that resonates deeply with aspects of modernist abstraction. Now the quilts are the subject of an exhibition that is touring U.S. museums - Critical Essay
Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Richard Kalina
It is a given that most museum shows of recent art serve to ratify accepted tastes and standards. A Johns or Flavin retrospective, or a survey of Fluxus art, while certainly deepening our knowledge of the subject, is not about to change perceptions significantly. Even a large-scale review of a first-rate but underappreciated artist--the still traveling Joan Mitchell retrospective, for example--essentially rearranges the pieces on the board. It is rare to find an exhibition that throws something totally unexpected our way, that forces us to carve out a meaningful chunk of historical space to make room for a new body of work. "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and shown last winter at the Whitney Museum, does just that.
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The 60 quilts in the exhibition were made by a group of women in a small, isolated farming community in central Alabama, southwest of Selma. Gee's Bend was and is an almost exclusively African-American hamlet. Surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River, it is virtually an island; after the residents began to assert their civil rights in the 1960s, its ferry service was terminated (probably not coincidentally), and its one access road, some 15 miles from the nearest highway, remained unpaved until 1967. Today the area is starting to become more connected with the outside world, and is at the same time losing its quilting tradition. The town's isolation during the '50s, '60s and '70s--the period when most of the quilts in the exhibition were done--made it nearly impossible for the quilters to have been exposed in any contextualized or coherent way to modern art, although images of abstract art or design may have crossed their paths via magazines and newspapers. (1) And yet these works seem to resonate harmonically with many strands of geometrically-based and materially innovative postwar American abstraction, as well as with that abstraction's European antecedents.
Although the Gee's Bend quilters were not part of the mainstream art world, it is important to understand that they formed an art world of their own, that is, a coherent social grouping dedicated to the construction of a visual language. They shared a sense of esthetic lineage (patterns and ways of working were handed down through extended families and known to the rest of the community), a recognized means of display (the quilts were hung out on clotheslines not just to dry, but to be seen), a concern with the interplay of individual and collaborative work and, importantly, a set of common limits. The women knew each other and were often related--of the 41 artists in the show, 18 belong to the Pettway family, which took its name from the area's principal slave-owner. Religion also played a vital, unifying role in the lives of Gee's Benders. The Baptist church was the place where people not only prayed but organized their community and exchanged information, including ideas about sewing and quilting. (2) It is clear that Gee's Bend quilters were neither insular visionaries pursuing idiosyncratic personal paths, nor were they simply the skilled passers-on of traditional forms. Instead, they were like other artists of their time, adept, committed practitioners engaged in a measured and ongoing esthetic give-and-take.
The quilts of Gee's Bend are quite unlike the quilts we are used to seeing either the traditional or contemporary high-end ones, or the homey items readily available in stems or yard sales. Bold and declarative in design, material and format, they looked perfectly at ease on the Whitney's tall, white walls. While it is possible to understand the Gee's Bend quilts in the context of vernacular art, outsider art or craft, they are more than that. Their innovative power, combined with the restraints imposed by material, time and a compressed local tradition, argue for their examination as culturally informed and emotionally evocative formal objects.
To do so might seem like treading on dangerous ground. The history of 20th-century art is rife with attempts to rev up the contemporary and cosmopolitan with the raw power of the art of Africa, Oceania or the Americas, to infuse sophisticated studio products with the artlessness of children or the skewed sensibilities of the insane. In this way, "high art" can be bolstered by the art of the Other, and the transaction rendered morally frictionless by decontextualization in the ostensibly neutral space of a museum or gallery. The classic example of this was the 1984 exhibition "'Primitivism' in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern" at New York's Museum of Modern Art. The polemics occasioned by that show, most notably Thomas McEvilley's article "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief" (Artforum, November 1984), made the art world considerably more aware of its ethnocentrism. It seems, as if to compensate for past errors, that we moved in the other direction--towards an over-contextualization (marked by the proliferation of wall text and supplementary material) that serves to cocoon the objects in question and can, in its own way, be every bit as condescending. I am scarcely advocating cultural insensitivity, but rather noting that too much stage-setting and explanation can reinforce the dichotomy of centrality and marginality.
