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The Quilts of Gee's Bend, Alabama

Art lovers have recently been treated to exhibitions of a stunning collection of African American quilts from Gee’s Bend, a tight-knit black community in Alabama. But to most people, the artists and place that created them remain unknown. In 1967 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, today a medical anthropologist at Berkeley, traveled to Gee’s Bend to take part in a civil-rights related survey of the impoverished African American community. She left with a deep and lasting affection for the quilts she found there.

Read Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s account of her experience in Gee’s Bend and the quilts she found there in the Fall 2004 issue of Southern Cultures. Pictured here are representative quilts.

Bars and string-pieced columns quilt, 1950s, made by Jessie T. Pettway, cotton, 95 x 76 inches. Courtesy of Tinwood Alliance.

The author took "the quilts into the deep 'interior' of Massachusetts and Vermont, to shopkeepers and antique stores dealers--to people who really understood quality crafts and surely knew something about quilting. But something akin to a bitter culture war took place each time I would bring out a sample of those decidedly antagonistically un-Yankee Gee's Bend quilts. 'They don't look right,' we were told."

Yellow star quilt, a Freedom Quilting Bee design made with fabrics from Liberty of London. Photograph by Nancy Calahan, courtesy of Nancy Scheper-Hughes.

"'Look,' said one northerin civil rights worker, 'it's a kind of southern psychedelic Op Art!'"

Work clothes quilt with center medallion of strips, 1976, made by Annie Mae Young, denim, corduroy, synthetic blend, 108 x 77 inches. Courtesy of Tinwood Alliance.