The Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers

1920s-present · Boykin (Gee's Bend), Alabama, USA

In a bend of the Alabama River, generations of Black women turned worn-out work clothes into some of the boldest abstract art America has ever produced. They were made to keep children warm first.

The life

Gee’s Bend, officially Boykin, is a hamlet surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River, home to descendants of people enslaved on the Pettway plantation whose fields their families went on working for generations. In the Depression the federal government lent residents money to buy the land, and in that isolated place quilting passed from mother to daughter unbroken: the oldest surviving quilts date from the 1920s. In 2002 The Quilts of Gee’s Bend opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and travelled to the Whitney, and quilters like Mary Lee Bendolph, Loretta Pettway, Irene Williams and Lola Pettway were suddenly hailed among America’s great artists.

The work

Improvised geometry in denim, corduroy, cotton and feed sacks, cut from work clothes and dresses, pieced by eye with a freedom that critics compared to modernist painting, though it owed modernism nothing. Quilts from Gee’s Bend are now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Why we love them

A whole canon made at the frame after the day’s work was done, by women the art world took a century to notice. The river kept them isolated; the isolation kept them free.

Go deeper

• The Gee's Bend Quiltmakers at the Outsider Art Fair
• The Gee's Bend Quiltmakers on Wikipedia
• Souls Grown Deep Foundation
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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