IMMA Dublin: Fascinating patchwork of social history behind American quilts exhibition
Louisiana P Bendolph and Rita Mae Pettway may not be household names, but their extraordinary quilts have been exhibited in museums all over the world, and are now having their first showing in Ireland at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham, Dublin.
The exhibition, Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee's Bend, is jointly organised by IMMA and Souls Grown Deep, a non-profit established to preserve, document and promote the artistic legacies of black American artists based in the Southern United States. Many of the organisation's activities centre on the quiltmakers of Gee's Bend, a small farming community in rural Alabama.
'Gee's Bend is positioned in a U-shaped curve in the middle of the Alabama river,' says Raina Lampkins-Fielder, Souls Grown Deep's chief curator. 'What's interesting is that this geographically isolated black community of around 700 people has remained in a certain way intact since their ancestors were forcibly brought there in the early 1800s.
'In that time, Gee's Bend has produced over five generations of quiltmakers. They've been producing work as far back as the mid 19th century, and maybe longer, and they continue to transmit that artistic knowledge and their skills from mother to daughter, from aunt to niece, and from one neighbour to another.'
The first black families to settle in Gee's Bend were slaves on the 6,000-acre Joseph Gee plantation, which eventually passed to the Sheriff of Halifax County, Mark H Pettway. After President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the emancipation of slaves in 1863, most of the families stayed on the land as sharecroppers, or tenant farmers.
'This makes Gee's Bend quite unique,' says Lampkins-Felder. 'Folks in the Bend didn't necessarily have to participate in the great migration of black people from the south to the north for opportunities or to escape Jim Crow oppression.'
In the 1930s, President Franklin D Roosevelt introduced the New Deal socio-economic programme, in response to the Great Depression. 'Gee's Bend was one of those places that benefited. Part of the New Deal involved the building of new houses. In Gee's Bend, you got a small cabin. It didn't have all the mod cons we expect today, but living standards certainly improved. There was no running water or plumbing or heat or electricity, but still, it was a little bit better, and being able to purchase those homes was incredibly important.'
One of the pieces in Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee's Bend.
The New Deal also encouraged the tenant farmers to buy plots of land in the old Pettway plantation. 'You'll hear that surname, Pettway, a lot with the quiltmakers in Gee's Bend. It doesn't necessarily mean that there's any blood relation. It's just that legacy of slavery, of taking the name of the enslaver.'
The lack of heating in the New Deal cabins was largely what inspired the women to continue making quilts. 'Even though it's Alabama,' says Lampkins-Fielder, 'the winters are bitterly cold. It's hot during the day, it's like the desert climate in that respect, but it's really, really cold at night. And so they kept making quilts to keep warm. But in the Bend, you know, there wasn't a lot of extra material around. Even to this day, there's not a post office, or any store at all.
'But one could recycle material. Worn out school clothes or dress shirts or work clothes. Flour or sugar or feed sacks. All of these, when they were no longer useful, were recycled for the quilts. So this whole notion of the patchwork quilt really comes out of those times of scarcity and resourcefulness. There was this incredibly inventive salvaging.'
It was the practice for the women to air their quilts outdoors in the autumn. 'And this was an opportunity for folks to see what you'd been up to. The quilts were draped over clothes lines, wood piles and porches, like this massive plein air gallery.'
The quilts got a wider airing from 1966, when 60 quilters from Gee's Bend and its environs formed the Quilters Freedom Bee, a co-operative that marketed their creations to department stores such as Sear's and Bloomingdale's.
Thereafter, the art world began taking notice. The abstract painter Lee Krasner was a vocal champion, calling the quilts 'magnificent' and investing in several for her own collection. In 2002, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, mounted a ground-breaking exhibition, The Quilts of Gee's Bend, which toured to the Whitney Museum of Fine Art in New York.
Leola Pettway and Qunnie Pettway working on quilts at Gee's Bend, Alabama.
'That was when I got acquainted with Gee's Bend,' says Lampkins-Fielder. 'That was really the watershed moment for me. I was an associate director of the Whitney Museum, and I worked with Max Anderson, who's now the president of Souls Burn Deep.'
Reviewers compared the Gee's Bend quilts to the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists Barnett Newman and Frank Stella, and their artistic forebears, Paul Klee and Henri Matisse.
In the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman declared them 'eye-poppingly gorgeous' and 'some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced,' high praise indeed when one considers that textiles were still considered a craft by many critics.
Years later, Lampkins-Fielder moved to Paris, France to work with the Mona Bismarck American Centre of Art and Culture. 'We were trying to do something a little bit different around how people can approach art,' she says.
"And then, when the opportunity to work with Souls Grown Deep came up, I thought, well, this is absolutely amazing. I wondered if my being based in Paris would be problematic, but no, strangely, my being here works really well. I had a long career in the States, so I still have connections to the art world there.
"And then, being based in Paris, I can open doors to Europe in a way that if I were based in the States, I really wouldn't have that access and that facility of movement.'
Lampkins-Fielder estimates that Souls Grown Deep has invested almost a million dollars in the Gee's Bend community over the past four or five years.
'I love being an advocate for these artists,' she says, 'helping their voices to be projected more broadly and become more widely known. But we still have so much to do. Their work should really speak for itself, you know.'
Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee's Bend runs at IMMA until October 27 Further information: imma.ie soulsgrowndeep.org
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