What We're Reading

Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt

Authors: William Arnett, Louisiana P. Bendolph, and Mary Lee Bendolph
Publisher: Tinwood
$50.00 Cloth (223 p.)
ISBN: 9780971910454
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Reviewed by Linda Martin, Customer Service Bibliographer

This is an important book designed to accompany Houston's Museum of Fine Arts June 2005 exhibition. It honors a widely praised exhibition that continues to travel (through 2008) and should appeal to those interested in fiber arts as well as to anyone interested in the history of modern art.

The book is comprised of ten essays that explore community, family structure, and the origin of an aesthetic which shaped a heritage of quilt making among at least 5 generations of women born in the enclave of Gee's Bend, Alabama. It is wonderfully full of stunning photographs by the Pitkin Studio of Rockford, Illinois and by Paul and William Arnett. It is, as they say, hard to put down. Quilters should be prepared to suddenly find themselves appraising the potential of old clothes and attempting patternless work. Non quilters should enjoy both the color and the history.

This is the third monograph* to celebrate the quilts and their makers and while I don't have the former books to compare contents, I did see a variation of this exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery in DC and I can tell you that you may well enjoy this book no matter how much you have looked at the others. There are quilts here made in the last four years as well as some of the finest previously documented. The essays explain the environment and the historical connections between generations, but at the heart of the book are the voices of three quilters: Louisiana P. Bendolph, Mary Lee Bendolph, and Loretta Bennett. Particularly satisfying is the highlighting of the recent Bendolph quilts which affirm the organic development of a sensitive and discriminating aesthetic as well as the pride developed in seeing how the community's quilts were treated in museums and in print.

Gee's Bend is described as a community that up to the 1960's was isolated by its geography and poverty. The original "Benders" were slaves who after the civil war continued to live as tenant farmers on this isolated stretch of the Alabama River. Though I was prepared to hear of hard times up through the Depression, it surprised me to hear that even in the 1970's the 700 or so inhabitants were constrained by a poverty that kept children from going to school as long as there was a crop to be harvested. The community didn't connect to the electric grid until 1966 and it was another ten years before telephones and water that did not have to be carried became available.

Unrelenting destitution led the women of the community to make quilts purely for warmth from whatever fabric could be scrounged from discarded clothing: the back of a pant leg, the front of a sleeve, a piece of skirting. The number of quilts that have been made seems enormous until one learns that they served not only as blankets, but as pallets and as wall, window and floor insulation. A woman might make several new quilts in a winter. In the earliest recorded quilts we see mostly heavy-duty work clothes: blue jeans and khaki worn to various shades of indigo and beige which make the quilts surprisingly painterly. Other colors crept in as they became available. When Sears Roebuck hired pieceworkers in the early '70's, they left behind scraps of corduroy with colors that scream of the era: avocado green, tangerine, harvest gold, and brown. Even this color scheme rose phoenix-like in the hands of women who, by this time, had become a dynasty of recognized quilt makers.

The weight of proving the architectural metaphor is carried more by fine photographs (made by the Arnetts) of the local landscape and buildings than it is by the essays. I think the title misses the mark. The women do occasionally speak of the fabric pieces as planks and compare their work to the adding on of rooms, but what I noticed in these essays far more frequently is an accute sensitivity to colors in the environment. Sure, they build organically, a sort of vernacular architecture in fabric, but what bowls one over is the syncopating, affective drama of color.

Much has been said since Michael Kimmelman's glowing review in the NY Times that correctly compares the work to that of the abstract expressionists. The quilts frequently remind one of the Modernists as well. The abstract fragmentation, the square frame and the large scale dispose one to see relationships that range from Matisse to Sean Scully. In fact, it is our experience of these painters that leads us to our ability to see the quilts as art. What a shame it would be if they had not.

See also:
The Quilts of Gee's Bend, John Beardley et al, 2002, 140p, 9780971910409
Gee's Bend: The Women and Their Quilts, John Beardsley et al, 2002, 432p, 9780965376648
Mary Lee Bendolph: Gee's Bend Quilts and Beyond, Arnett Paul, 2007, 72p, 9781961910485