Mary Lee Bendolph and family entrust over 100 Gee's Bend Quilts to Souls Grown Deep

Mary Lee Bendolph and family entrust over 100 Gee's Bend Quilts to Souls Grown Deep

Souls Grown Deep has announced that it has been entrusted by artists Mary Lee Bendolph (b. 1933) and Essie Bendolph Pettway (b. 1956) to steward over 100 quilts made by them, with the express goal of their distribution to major collections. Together, their artworks are widely considered among the most inventive and fundamental examples of quiltmaking in Gee’s Bend, the home of “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced” (The New York Times).

Souls Grown Deep Elects Lola C. West as Board Chair
Souls Grown Deep announced today that Lola C. West has been elected chair of its Board of Directors. West has served on the board since 2019. With more than 20 years of experience in financial advising and fundraising, West has infused her passion and advocacy for social justice, racial equity, and gender rights to create spaces of opportunity, helping progressive institutions build a vision for the future. She is a co-founder of leading Black-owned, multi-racial, gender diverse, independent advisory and wealth management firm Westfuller Advisors, where she currently serves as Chairwoman and Chief Culture Officer. In her previous career as an event producer and fundraiser, she worked with clients, including The Studio Museum of Harlem, NAACP, and President Nelson Mandela, leading the United States fundraising strategy for his successful election in 1994.
Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South review – hardwon labours of love

Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South review – hardwon labours of love

A line strung with dead birds runs across an overcast sky of blue-grey enamel. The image appears familiar: crows used as scarecrows, the dead displayed to warn off the living. But these birds turn out to be scraps of black cloth suspended from real wire against the canvas, each with curiously human overtones. A glove, a hat, the actual traces of people – beyond the allusions to Jim Crow laws and southern lynchings the tragic poetry is irreducible. These flightless birds have neither life nor freedom.

Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers review – art of poverty and resilience from the US south

Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers review – art of poverty and resilience from the US south

Narratives of the great migration and the Harlem renaissance have dominated conversations around African American art in the 20th century, but a new exhibition, Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers, which opens at the Royal Academy in London this week, invites us to consider the cultural contribution of artists from the American south. Communities that remained there in the aftermath of the civil war continued to be exposed to extremes of racial violence, segregation and the hardship of economic exclusion.

Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South

Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South

Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South will showcase unique African American artistic traditions and methods of visual storytelling. The distinctive creativity of the artists in this exhibition has brought about artworks whose subjects and materials often reverberate with the South’s painful history – the inhuman practice of enslavement, the cruel segregationist policies of the Jim Crow era, institutionalised racism as well as the Civil Rights Movement.

Souls Can Grow Deeper Still

Souls Can Grow Deeper Still

The line of demarcation between “folk” and “fine” art in America is centuries old and extends far beyond the founding of our nation. The former, which includes practices like needlework, woodwork, basket weaving, and ceramics has long been considered the lesser of painting, sculpture, and other works that align with art world standards. There’s no coincidence these works are often gendered, associated with the home and “feminine” qualities, racialized, classed, thus deemed “unrefined” and considered “skilled labor,” more akin to artisan than artist.

Threading Lightly

Threading Lightly

According to Lauren Bravo’s book, How to Break Up with Fast Fashion, we only wear 10-20 percent of the clothes in our closets on a daily basis. Patrick Robinson—a designer who has transformed global brands such as Giorgio Armani, Perry Ellis, and the Gap—has made it his mission to change how we approach consumerism and our closets. Worth sat down with Robinson to discuss the deep-seated issues of exploitation and excess in the fashion industry and how his regenerative brand, Paskho, is changing fashion’s landscape.

Spotlight Finally Shines On Thornton Dial Sr. In Birmingham, Alabama

Spotlight Finally Shines On Thornton Dial Sr. In Birmingham, Alabama

Sometimes, the home folks are the hardest to impress. Long after the wider world has opened its arms, home folks continue casting a leery eye. Alabama’s Thornton Dial Sr. (1928–2016) had his first solo museum exhibition jointly presented by the New Museum and the American Folk Art Museum in New York in 1993. His work was featured in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. In 2005, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston gave him a solo show. In 2011, another solo presentation visited the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Mint Museum in Charlotte and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art.
A Unique Fashion Collab Spotlights Artisan Quilters In The American South

A Unique Fashion Collab Spotlights Artisan Quilters In The American South

Gee’s Bend is a tiny, isolated rural hamlet in Alabama, USA. Located in a literal bend in the Alabama River, the community is almost completely surrounded by water geographically and culturally disconnected from so much of the rest of the world. Many of its African-American community, who number less than 1,000, can trace their descendants back to slaves from the cotton plantation established at Gee’s Bend in 1816.

The Airing of the Quilts: Boykin quilters celebrate centuries of tradition

The Airing of the Quilts: Boykin quilters celebrate centuries of tradition

Unlike her mother, grandmother and generations dating back to the 1800s, Louise Williams does not quilt. When she was younger, her refusal to carry on the tradition was an act of rebellion, breaking the bounds of what was expected of her. Instead of working in the Freedom Quilting Bee cooperative, sewing pillow shams for Sears Roebuck and quilts for collectors, she went to school and left the state. “I barely can put a button on or sew a hem. That was something that escaped me,” Williams said. “But this was always home.”