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Gee’s Bend—or Boykin, as it was officially renamed in 1949—sits at a hairpin turn along the Alabama River in the heart of the state’s Black Belt, a region that was named for its rich topsoil and that remains inextricably intertwined with histories of enslavement, dispossession, and civil rights organizing. Gee’s Bend is small, a hamlet, really; its inhabitants, many of whom are descended from Africans enslaved on Joseph Gee’s cotton plantation in the early 19th century, number fewer than 300 people today. But the community’s cultural footprint, in contrast to its population, is massive: Gee’s Bend is the birthplace of the most significant intergenerational quilting tradition in the history of the United States and is now also acknowledged as one of the most important sites of 20th century American abstraction.

Beauty without bias can be seen at TMA in 24 artworks from Black makers across the Deep South through May 1, 2022, during its exhibition “Living Legacies: Art of the African American South.” Each piece has been acquired by TMA in the past two years from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to documenting, preserving and promoting the artistic production and cultural traditions of Black artists from the rural South. 

The New Bend, curated by Legacy Russell and currently on view at Hauser and Wirth, New York, looks at the raced, classed and gendered traditions of quilting and textile through the work of 12 contemporary artists. Its title is an explicit reference and homage to the quilters of Gee’s Bend, a Black women’s cooperative set up on a former slave-owning plantation in Alabama and which, since the 1960s, have become known for their intergenerational quilting practices and their striking, modernist compositions. Borne out of a necessity to recycle scraps of fabric, the quilts have in recent years garnered institutional attention, including a major retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum in 2002, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend.

Born in 1929, the Black autodidact sculptor Bessie Harvey created mixed-media assemblages from materials located in the woods surrounding her home in Alcoa, Tennessee. Harvey, who died in 1994, was guided largely through life by the teachings of the Bible. Her keen wit and unorthodox perspectives on her faith granted her access to sidestep dogma and dare to stand in undeviating opposition to the congregation as she contemplated racism and religion. The collective wisdom that she acquired through the diasporic Black American experience of womanhood, and of living within systems of racial segregation and associated economic retribution, informed her survival in an unconcerned white supremacist climate and also allowed her to recall her value and humanity, which she poured into her art.

Quilting, or the stitching together of various layers of textiles and padding, is a creative process that dates back thousands of years. While the practical purpose of quilting is to provide warmth and protection, quilts throughout history have typically included decorative elements regardless of their necessity. Among the most recognizable and beloved blankets in the world are those made by the Gee’s Bend quilters, a collective of Black women in the American South who have been quilting for several generations. Explore the rich history, community traditions, and distinctive craftsmanship that is thoughtfully and expertly stitched into each one of the Gee’s Bend quilts.

For centuries, craftspeople have joined fibers and fabrics to tell tales about time, color, and space. Though textiles and quilts have often been associated with domesticity, they can be more than gorgeous practical items. These pieces have long been recognized for their aesthetic value, and in recent years, art-world aficionados have increasingly taken notice.

Quilts made by generations of women in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, have hung in the Met, the Whitney, and the Smithsonian Museum of Art. They’ve been shown at galleries and art fairs around the world. But if the quilters want to directly sell their world-famous quilts — vibrant, often asymmetrical, charismatic works, originally hand-stitched for warmth from scavenged fabric — they’ve had to wait for prospective buyers to come to them. That requires a drive deep into the Alabama Black Belt, along red dirt roads with little to no cell signal, through an isolated stretch of grassy meadows and pine woods, to a community deep in an oxbow of the Alabama River that, if the ferry’s not running, is nearly 40 miles from the closest hotel, supermarket, or pharmacy. At least, this is how it worked before February of 2021.

The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) has named Valerie Cassel Oliver, the curator of an acclaimed survey about sound and Southern culture, as the 2022 recipient of its Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. The prize, which goes to one curator annually, comes with a $25,000 purse. “Valerie Cassel Oliver should be considered one of America’s great ‘thought leaders,’ a curator who constantly surprises, enlightens, and broadens the scope of art,” said Tom Eccles, executive director of CCS Bard, in a statement.

Gee’s Bend, Alabama, couldn’t be real. That’s what fashion designer Patrick Robinson, who knew of the storied Gee’s Bend’s quilters, figured. “I’ve owned the books of Gee’s Bend forever. I never thought it was a real place,” says Robinson, founder of the New York City-based Paskho clothing company. “I thought it was this mystical place where people made … I mean, if you look at the art, the craft that people make, it blows your mind. So I didn’t believe they existed.” Yet, the self-proclaimed “weird one from New York with the Afro” sits at a real aluminum picnic table under a real Southern pine on a stunning late fall day, outside a building bustling with real seamstresses – including some quilters – to assemble clothing for Paskho. In the real community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama.

Lonnie Holley came to art via tombstones. In 1979, when his sister lost two children in a house fire, Holley managed his grief by chipping away at stone, carving headstones for his niece and nephew’s graves. Afterward, he kept making sculptures and eventually began working with other materials, like wood, barbed wire, and animal bones. Despite their formal eclecticism, these pieces share a purpose: they suggest jagged totems for departed spirits. At the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, in the exhibition “Another Tradition: Drawings by Black Artists from the American South,” one of Holley’s assemblages acted as a conduit for the dead.