Bring Home a Piece of American History with These Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers Prints
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When the enslaved women who worked Joseph Gee’s cotton plantation in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, in the 1800s first began quilting, it sprang from a basic need for warmth. After the price of cotton fell, prompting a mass exodus by nearly six million African Americans out of the rural South, this cultural tradition became a livelihood for the people of the Bend who were able to keep their land and homes. The piecing together of scraps of fabric and clothing to make abstract designs would ultimately be passed down for generations, finally becoming formalized in 1966 as the Freedom Quilting Bee. It would become an outlet for African American women from Gee’s Bend and nearby Rehoboth to gain economic independence—it was also the reinvention of an art form.
Five decades on, the quilters of the Bend have been recognized as one of America’s foremost artist communities, whose unique patchwork quilts have found their rightful place in the permanent collections of more than 30 leading art museums across the country and have been featured in collaborations with designers like Paskho, Chloé, and Greg Lauren (as seen on Questlove at the 2022 Oscars and in the Met Costume Institute exhibition In America: A Lexicon of Fashion). Now, in time for Black History Month, the nonprofit Souls Grown Deep is launching a limited-edition collection that offers another way to support the quilters’ work and bring home a piece of history.
The online store features archival reproductions of more than 150 works by Black artists from the South, including more than two dozen Gee’s Bend quiltmakers. One quilt print vaunts a bold combination of jewel-toned color blocks, punctuated by linear fabric patches made by Willie “Ma Willie” Abrams, a fixture in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Another displays a cheery sky blue and cherry red mosaic of triangles that make up an artful disruption of regular patterns common in the work of many Gee’s Bend quiltmakers (the work of Mensie Lee Pettway).
In addition to the archival reproductions, the store is selling a series of corduroy pillow covers. The colorful cushions are replicas of a contract that the Alberta, Alabama–based sewing cooperative, Freedom Quilting Bee, had with Sears in 1972. “Production of the Sears pillow covers left little room for personal creativity, as labor at the Freedom Quilting Bee was divided to maximize daily output,” the Souls Grow Deep site says on the product page. “Yet despite the standardized and repetitive process involved in producing the pillow covers, the availability of corduroy, a fabric seldom used before by the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers, stimulated a profound creative response.”
The pillow covers come in a variety of colors, including gold, avocado leaf, tangerine, and bright red. All proceeds will benefit the Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy, a cultural center dedicated to sustaining the history and traditions of the Bee.
Housetop, c. 1975
Housetop, c. 1975
soulsgrowndeep.org
$45.00
“Bricklayer” variation, 1975
“Bricklayer” variation, 1975
soulsgrowndeep.org
$45.00
“Housetop”—fractured medallion variation, 1977
“Housetop”—fractured medallion variation, 1977
soulsgrowndeep.org
$45.00
“Roman Stripes” variation, c. 1975
“Roman Stripes” variation, c. 1975
soulsgrowndeep.org
$85.00
Log Cabin variation, c. 1990
Log Cabin variation, c. 1990
soulsgrowndeep.org
$85.00
Bricklayer (detail), c. 1975
Bricklayer (detail), c. 1975
soulsgrowndeep.org
$45.00
These were drafted by Raina Lampkins Fielder, curator at SGD.
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