A Place Called Space: The Quilts of Gee's Bend, at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Wednesday 17 May 2023

The Quilts of Gee's Bend, at the Royal Academy of Arts.

The Quilts of Gee's Bend, at the Royal Academy of Arts.

(Part of Souls Grow Deep like the Rivers, exhibition)

The quilts of Gee's Bend are quilts created by a group of women and their ancestors who live or have lived in the isolated African-American hamlet of Gee's Bend, Alabama, along the Alabama River. The quilts of Gee's Bend are among the most important African-American visual and cultural contributions of the history of art within the USA.

Many of the residents in the community can trace their ancestry back to enslaved people from the Pettway Plantation. Arlonzia Pettway can recall her grandmother's stories of her ancestors, specifically of Dinah Miller, who was brought to the US by slave ship on 1859. The area is named after Joseph Gee, a landowner who came from North Carolina and established a cotton plantation in 1816 with his seventeen slaves.

After the American Civil War many of the formerly enslaved people remained on the plantation working as shareroppers, who were obliged to give part of their crop to the ladowner, and many inhabitants today will bear the surnames of their ancestors' enslavers. The community was able to remain intact due to government loans provided during the Depression which enabled tenants to buy the land they farmed and protected them from forced evictions.

This continuity allowed a unique tradition of quiltmaking to survive and be passed down through generations of women. Most of Gee's Bend quilts are improvisational or 'my way' quilts. Quiltmakers start with basic forms then head off 'their way' with unexpected patterns, unusual colours and surprising rhythms.

When the quilts toured US museums in 2022, their luscious hues, scissored shapes and improvised visual rhythms garnered comparisons to Paul Klee and Henri Matisse.